8 social media stats we can actually use
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I was doing some research on social media use for a project, and found the vast majority of statistics quite useless. For example, what can you do with the fact that 55 million status updates are posted daily to Facebook – or that every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube?
These stats, however, looked like numbers we could act on:
- Social media is used more often than personal email (Nielson Online)
- 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs (Universal McCann)
- Organizations that blog get 97% more inbound links to their website, and 55% more website visitors (Hubspot research)
80% of companies use LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees[update 1/27/10 - Robert points out this is not totally accurate - I apologize for the error]- The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes per day on the site
- Typical person on Facebook has 120 friends, but only communicates regularly with 4-6 of these (Economist)
- Only 5% of Twitter users have more than 100 followers (Pear Research)
- 5% of users account for 75% of overall tweets (Pear Research)
What type of statistics are most useful to you?





Right on. It’s more informative and easy to understand. Thanks a lot such a nice guideline.
Glad you like it!
Nice summary, Josiah, thanks!
Great stats – the only one I would question is the LinkedIn stat – was initially sourced from the Socialnomics video – Here is a blog post that debunks several statistics (including the LinkedIn stat) from that video – http://www.rockcheetah.com/blog/social-media/socialnomics-should-not-be-voodoo-economics/
Actual stat was that 64.6% of 438 respondents to an online Jobvite survey had used LinkedIn in some capacity – a far cry from 80% of all companies using it as a primary tool.
I stand to be corrected. Thanks for pointing that out, Robert!