Social Markets for Social Media: The Marketees

Where is all this energy going?  It is being transformed from theoretical Internet particles (think photons) into real-life change for the better via social action, of course!  That is, assuming that the social media marketers are aware of and making proper use of the appropriate social media outlets given their goals, audiences and products or services.

Either way, though, social media has captured millions of people's attention.  The average user spends 9 hours a day in front of some kind of screen, a third of that being for entertainment, 2 and a half for news-related recreation, a touch over an hour for social networking, an hour for gaming, and only about 45 minutes micro-blogging (like Twitter).  And this is fairly consistent worldwide, with Asia taking up the largest portion of the social networking usage pie (35%), followed by the lump sum of Europe's, the Middle East and Africa's usage (at nearly 30%), North America at a quarter and Latin America at just above 10%.

According to recent research, Facebook is the largest social media database for sharing information - even above e-mail (which comes in a far second).  As just an idea of how "large" is large, the equivalent of 265 centuries was spent on Facebook in April (a 300% increase from the same month in 2008).  Twitter is about half as popular, but it is only one tenth the size of Facebook, so it could prove to be some formidable competition if it continues its current rate of growth.  Other social media tools - Myspace, Youtube, Google bookmarks and social media blogs like Digg and Redditt - each take about 3-5% of the total social media attention.

This data matters in its own rite, of course: "content-sharers" are the fuel for the Facebook and Twitter fire.  But (the age-old...or, the my-blog-old...question), what sort of content is being shared, and can it be used to fuel the (arguably more important )positive change fire?  Globally, uploading photos and maintaining an online social networking profile are the most popular social media activities.  Extrapolating from a 2009 survey of 2,000 random tweets, half the content on Twitter is either spam or "babble", with only about 5% being promotional of any kind (and even then, this promotional is of the "self" persuasion), and 10% being somewhat interesting (to the exclusion of the near 40% of content that is conversational).  There was not a "tweets that beet" category like "stuff that is translated into real-world action."  Good thing micro-blogging services are globally the least popular of all social media content sharing capabilities!

Even with the absurd volume of social media use (it is absurd when 95% of business decision makers use some sort of social media, I mean, this has to influence their decisions!), and even though the growth of social media sites is exponential, gargantuan and astronomical, 87% of adults still claimed in the 2009 study to prefer face-to-face meetings and dealings.  In fact, that's one of the New Rules of Highly Evolved Humans: removing the screen to meet and greet!  Once again, the success of online social media seems to rely on real-world aspects of life - like relationships!  So, there may be hope for real world change generated by social media after all!

Photo credit: http://www.pamorama.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Social-Media-Building.gif