Ever wonder what the future of Twitter, Facebook, and others might be ?

Many people still think technologies haven't caught on or that investing in social media isn't worth their church's time. Next time you hear that from someone, perhaps you could share a few of these statistics with them:
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The Internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
• Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.
• More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day and more than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day. Combined, more than 5 billion minutes are spent on the site on a daily basis.
•Over the past 12 months, Twitter’s year-on-year growth rate has broken the 1000% barrier.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.
•Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the Internet is on social media sites.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
• 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
• Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
• The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
• It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
• According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
• The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
• Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active Internet users regularly read blogs.

Although these statistics look impressive, it needs to be remembered that no single piece of data can be used to base strategy or objectives upon, let alone be used as a forecast for future growth of a specific area of social media. To really drill down into a sector of interest, you need to fully aggregate and analyse all available data before making an informed decision or conclusion.

YouTube
•If YouTube were a country, it would be the third most-populated place in the world.
• 20 hours-worth of video is uploaded to the site every single minute.
•comScore recently announced that the site had surpassed 100m viewers in the USA alone. They also reported that this US audience consumed over 6bn videos at the beginning of this year.
•According to Youtube themselves, over half of users visit the site at least once a week

Facebook
According to Facebook’s internal statistics:
•The site has more than 250m active users globally
•More than 120m users log on to Facebook at least once each day and more than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day. Combined, more than 5bn minutes are spent on the site on a daily basis.
•The average user has around 120 friends on the site.
•Every single month, more than a billion photos are uploaded to the site.
•More than 50 translations are available on the site, with more than 40 in development.
•Mobile is a big issue, with more than 30m active users accessing the site through mobile devices. It's well documented that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.

MySpace
• Although now overtaken by Facebook, MySpace is the second largest social network, experiencing in excess of 60m unique users each month.
• MySpace apparently reaches 30% of UK adults aged 15-24 - it's been suggested that its as common to have a MySpace account in the UK as it is to own a dog.
• According to Knol, MySpace has more than 115m active monthly users globally with, on average, 300,000 new people signing up to the site every day.
Twitter
• Over the past twelve months, Twitter’s year-on-year growth rate has broken the 1000% barrier.
•The company holds exact numbers close to their chest, but it's estimated that

Twitter currently has between 6 - 10m global users and this is growing rapidly.
• According to a recent report on Twitter usage by Sysomos, 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity and that 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
• The same report found that over 50% of all updates are published using mobile and Web-based tools, other than Twitter.com’s own website.
• It also found that Tuesday is the most active day for Tweeting, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
• Hitwise recently reported that one out of every 350 website visits in the UK is via Twitter, but barely 5% of users currently go to an online retail service through the medium. Not really a stat, but still quite a cool piece of info:

Twitter is now officially a term in the English Dictionary. "Enough Said"