One frequently asked question I get from broadcasters is, “Why do I have to participate in social media? I have my hands full with doing broadcast right? Plus there’s no money in it.”
Sounds valid but here’s a video you may want to watch and I’ve listed just a few of the statistics of possible interest:
- Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
- 96% 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
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
- What happens in Vegas (or on your station) stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
- The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
- Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
- 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% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & 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% of consumers trust peer recommendations
- Only 14% trust advertisements
- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
- 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
HubSpot CEO, Brian Halligan, thinks that questioning the ROI of Social Media is akin to questioning the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning (you just have to do it).
Broadcasters – you will not change the world. The world has already changed. You used to be able to talk “to” the audience but now you must talk “with” the audience. You have a golden opportunity. Social Media is not a threat. Talk “with” us!
Great stuff! I know a lot of people who are interested in social media, wether professionally or by mere interest, have seen that particular video but summing up the stats is great!
There was an article in the local newspaper here in the Netherlands where I live about young people, teenagers and kids who use social media and their parents. The parents have no clue whatsoever what social media is and what it means to their children. One of the questions the interviewer asked the kids was: “what about e-mail?” Their answer was: “e-mail?! That’s só 2002!”
They use social media to communicate and to express themselves to their peers. The teenagers themselves haven’t changed, they struggle with the same issues our parents did, the tools did change though. And it’s changing fast!