Some Captivating Social Media Stats – Now & Then!

Social media has come of age. There was a time when only a scant few would use social media tools to market their products or services, and even then after much deliberation and little expectations…but, boy have things changed!

Nowadays any marketing executive worth his salt knows that success in marketing cannot be achieved if the power of social media is not harnessed. After all, hard data does not lie. Let’s take a look at how the social media environment has changed in the last one year…just to get an idea of exactly how fast it is growing every single day.

A year back social networking platform Twitter had about 75m user accounts. Since then, the microblogging service has added 100 million more users, and has, according to some reports, even facilitated revolutions.

In early 2010 or so, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook had about 350 million users who were actively using the service. Then, towards the end of 2010 there was a lot of hoopla when it touched the 500 million user mark. But today even that number seems paltry, as Facebook proudly boasts of an astonishing 640 million active users worldwide.

We all know that Facebook and Twitter are two of the most popular social networking platforms to be used, but let’s not discount the social media platform of choice for professionals – LinkedIn! Last year, LinkedIn claimed to have 50 million users worldwide. Cue to 2011 and the service grew by a full 100 percent. That’s right…presently LinkedIn has over 100 million professionals, business executives, corporate agents, and so forth connecting with each other through this social networking service.

Another social platform that has seen incredible rise in popularity over the last one year is the popular image sharing website Flickr. This online community which is extensively used by bloggers to embed and share photographs, images, illustrations, etc claimed that it hosts more than 4 billion images in 2010. Presently the number seems to have grown by almost 25% and in December 2010, the number of images hosted by this website has touched 5 billion.

That’s all for now, but we’ll be back soon with more interesting tidbits from the world of social media!

Share this post

Tags: Blog, Facebook, Flickr, linkedin, Microblogging, Online Communities, online marketing, social, Social Media, Social Media Tools, social network, Social Networking, social networks, Twitter