8 social media stats we can actually use

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:

1. Social media is used more often than personal email (Nielson Online)
2. 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs (Universal McCann)
3. Organizations that blog get 97% more inbound links to their website, and 55% more website visitors (Hubspot research)
4. 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]
5. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes per day on the site
6. Typical person on Facebook has 120 friends, but only communicates regularly with 4-6 of these (Economist)
7. Only 5% of Twitter users have more than 100 followers (Pear Research)
8. 5% of users account for 75% of overall tweets (Pear Research)

What type of statistics are most useful to you?

Related posts:

• Online Survey: 93% Think Companies Should Use Social Media
• Six Basic Types of Social Media (And Which Is Best For You)
• Universal McCann releases new social media numbers
• The 5 Groups To Target In Social Media Marketing
• Creating a hotel social media management routine

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