80 Percent of Companies Use Social Media to Recruit. Are You on Board?

This is really more a share than a blog. Earlier this month, the updated video for social media statistics was released - you may remember the one from last year - a great video that went viral pretty quickly.

So I am doing my part and sharing this with you. I recommend you watch the video but in case you need the notes, below are the statistics that they share.

"Social Media Revolution 2" as of May 5, 2010

By Erik Qualman

It’s amazing how fast the world of social media moves! As many of the statistics from the original Social Media video have changed, I took a moment to refresh the video with a few new statistics and graphics.

• Over 50 percent of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
• 96 percent of them have joined a social network
• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
• Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)
• Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
• iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
• We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest ahead of the United States, and only behind China and India
• Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
• 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
• 80 percent of companies use social media for recruitment; the percent of these using LinkedIn 95 percent
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55 to 65 year-old females
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.
• 50 percent of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads and Tablets
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
• The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
• While you watch this 100 plus hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
• Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica, and 78 percent of these articles are non-English
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
• If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
• 25 percent of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• 34 percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
• 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14 percent trust advertisements
• Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI. 90 percent of people that can TiVo ads do
• Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books at Christmas
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
• 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
• We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
• We will no longer search for products and services; they will find us via social media
• Social Media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie, and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
• The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
• Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network