It’s no secret that ‘social media’ is growing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We won’t bore you too much with that.

There are a million and one places where you can find social media stats, but what use are statistics alone? It’s not until they’re put in to some perspective that they can truly be appreciated.

Leading digital blog, Econsultancy has been documenting social media facts and figures year-on-year and has recently published a post highlighting social media growth over the past year (or so).

The following statistics go some way to demonstrate the sheer scale of growth of some of the better-known social media channels.

Twitter

In January 2010 Twitter had 75 million user accounts, but only 15 million used the site regularly. This resulted in 27 million Tweets per day.

Now, there are more than 175 million registered Twitter users. How many of these are regular users is unclear, but the number of Tweets per day has rocketed to 95 million – an increase of 250 percent.

Linkedin

LinkedIn has grown by an impressive 100 percent from last year, it now has over 100 million users across the globe. Interestingly, 56% of these users are from outside of the US.

Facebook

The ever-growing behemoth that is Facebook has shown some impressive growth over the last year.

Back in January 2010, the site had 350 million active users across the globe, it now has in excess of 640 million – half of which login daily. Based on this figure, Facebook has seen a 40 percent increase in daily usage over the past 12 months.

Users accessing Facebook via their mobile device has grown by over 200 percent. In early 2010 the figure was around 65 million, it now stands upwards of 200 million. This figure evidently reflects the rise in mobile and tablet usage around the globe. Interestingly, those who access Facebook via their mobile device are proven to be twice as active as those who don’t.

People are sharing more content on Facebook now too. On average, there are more than 7 billion pieces of content shared on the site weekly. This figure has risen from last year, when it was 3.5 billion.

As Facebook continues to expand on its services, expect more growth for the next 12 months.

 Flickr

At the start of 2010, Flickr was hosting around 4 billion images.

Since then it has grown by around 25 percent. By December 2010, the site was hosting more than 5 billion images. This equates to it’s members uploading more than 3,000 images per minute.

 Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most visited and trusted websites in the world. At the turn of 2010 the site played host to over 14 million articles from over 85,000 different contributors.

Now, the site has grown to over 17 million articles from 91,000 contributors. That’s a lot of content!

Going back to the topic of showing numbers in perspective, the figures above demonstrate just that – a truly staggering rate of growth across the board.

What will the next 12 months hold? Will Facebook continue to grow at this rate? Will Google finally crack social media? Will Twitter run out of juice?

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last few years, you will all know what social media is and how big a role it is playing not only in our social lives but our business ones too and this is exactly what I am talking about when I say social media – the media to end all things social. Anti-social media we should call it.

As social media continues to grow, details are starting to surface about people’s behaviors and consumption of information in the social space.  Who is really benefiting? Is it improving our social lives or is it just improving the ways in which brands and the media can shove messages down our throats with no escape. Want some facts? Thought you might.

In a recent independent study by Retrevo Gadgetology it was found that over 19% of under 25’s wake up during the night to check their social networks and a further 32% check their social networks as soon as they wake up in the morning. Now that is some serious addiction, and the rest of the stats further demonstrate how addicted to social media our generation really are! (56%: Social media users check Facebook at least once a day for example). If you are reading this on your iPhone in the bathroom you can safely assume you are one of the addictives!

Unfortunately, we now belong to a generation that has embraced quantity over quality. It’s all about how many followers, friends, likes, members and shares we have but how many of those people can you actually call your friend? In a world where we spend the majority of our time tweeting, messaging, emailing, blogging and BBMing, there is little left over to actually say when confronted with a real-time encounter with a friend – they have already read, watched or seen where you have been, who you been talking to and what you have been up to.

Wall-e Fat People

So what am I really getting at? The scene above from a recent Pixar film, Wall-E, is what I am getting at. The death of the old-fashioned world as we know it, those interactive acts that are in danger of becoming almost obsolete: the face-to-face, one-on-one relationship.  As children we were warned against the dangers of talking to strangers and yet in the new world of micro blogging and social profiles we now openly have conversations and give away our personal lives willy nilly for no other reason than the fact we think we are being more social.

The sad fact is that we are not. There is a fine line between using social media to help improve our real social lives and social media taking over our real lives, where on the line do you sit?

I am by no means saying social media is bad, that would be silly thing to say and after all it is my job! All I am saying is have a think about how you are using your social networks in your personal life. Is it replacing your face-to-face relationships is it helping to build them?

Feel free to let me know your thoughts

However, if your a new company that is still establishing itself, how are you going to build any kind of following & build awareness for the brand? No one is going to search for you so how are you going to get people to “Fan” you?

Here is a quick example of how I used Facebook to build awareness for a new brand in a niche market at ZERO cost, zilch, nada. Enjoy

Hooked on Horses is a new equestrian magazine & website bringing everything Horse to its readers in Essex. Over the last few months since launching there has been a steady income of fans to the page who have discovered the magazine through Facebook or know about the brand through its magazine or website.

Before starting the activity, there were just over 400 fans and around 1000 friends (not bad going, but of course there is a considerable amount of room to grow)

Simply using the best of Facebook’s social features awareness was built across the target audience in order to increase the number of friends, fans and followers.Nothing ground breaking, nothing spectacular, just using the best of Facebook’s social tools to outreach & engage.

1. Setup a group or page that is of common interest to your target audience, in this case a group for all horse riders in Essex

2. Invite all your friends to join and ask them to invite their friends, with the aim of seeing how many horse riders there really are in Essex

3. Now you have a good following, you can start to engage with the audience through this group and post interesting but relevant news articles – this can be your own content or content from other people.

4. Add content and multimedia, share photos, start discussions. Really engage with the user and give them content they wish to know about, watch or read.

5. As people become aware of your brand, they start to follow and befriend you.

6. Before you know it, your friends and fan numbers have increased & people become more aware of the brand

7. You can then see through the analytic’s how many have then go on to visit the website & become more engaged with the magazine. Starting on Saturday evening with the web traffic dramatically increasing as Hooked on Horses engage with more of the audience across Facebook

So there you have it, like i say, nothing ground breaking or innovative. A simple way to communicate and engage with your target audience.

Social Networking websites continue to grow on a huge scale with Facebook recently announcing that they have now reached over 400 million worldwide users and Twitter soon to be reaching the benchmark of 50 million tweets per day. Facebook and Twitter also both boasted a  triple-digit growth in 2009 with social networking now accounting for 11% of all time spent online.

Not only have user figures grown across social media websites but so has usage and time spent on social networking sites. A report from The Nielsen Company showed that there has been a huge increase of 82% in time spent on social networking sites. Across the globe over the past year average time spent on social networking sites grew from 3 hours per month to 5.5 hours. In addition Nielsen concluded that overall social media sites such as Facebook are now the most common homepages for users and that people now spend the majority of theit internet time using social networks or blogs.

Forrester also recently produced some interesting stats about adults using social media. Some of the findings included:

• A third of adults post at least once a week to social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

• A quarter of adults publish a blog and upload video/audio they created.

• Nearly 60% maintain a profile on a social networking site.

• 70% Read blogs, tweets and watch UGC video.

UK Social Media Stats

The popularity of Social Media continues to rise rapidly in the UK, now accounting for almost 11% of the share of UK Internet visits – continually closing the gap on search and entertainment websites.

Facebook’s growth in the UK continues with a reported 24 million active users. It now accounts for over half of all visits to social networking sites in the UK with YouTube sitting in second with over 17% of visits. Despite the media coverage and growth of Twitter over the past year the micro-blogging site makes up only around 2% of visits to social media sites in the UK, only just surpassing Bebo.

The Growth of Facebook

With Facebook also surpassing the 400m user mark, below are some great graphs and stats to put the numbers in perspective from Pingdom.

Sources: Hitwise, Nielsen, Comscore, Forrester, Royal Pingdom.

A question I am often asked is why a fan page? why not just a group? Good question, one that Mashable has answered on its thread titled: difference between Facebook pages and groups. But for those lazy bones out there he is a summary:

For personal or smaller scale interaction then a group is great for this but Pages are better for brands, businesses, celebrities, bands all of whom want to interact with their “fans” without having them connected to a person account. Remember, there is a 5000 friend cap on Facebook, so you are limiting yourself with a personal account. The great thing about Pages is that you can grow as big as you want whilst keeping the focus on the organisation and sending messages, notifications and updates to large numbers of people, unlimited infact.

Setting it up
One of the many benefits of setting up a page is that you can include everything that relates to your business in one place with a built-in potential audience. For example, in your company overview, you can list links to pages on your website, your newsletter signup form, other social media, or whatever you want.

• Overview of company
• Website and contact info
• Press releases
• Videos
• Blog RSS
• Twitter updates
• Company news and status
• Customer interaction

You can also easily update the information any time you wish too, and the fresher your content the more you will engage people.

**TIP** When uploading your photo or logo, include your website address at the bottom. Although fans cant click on this, your audience will know where to go if they want to visit your website

Enhance your Page
Before reaching out to your fans, try and make something of your page. You can do this by adding applications to your page, giving particular function to your page such a videos, RSS feeds or twitter feeds. You want to provide a reason for your visitors to come back and the best way to do this is to engage with them.

The other option, if you have the budget for it, is to create a custom app. For example the pizza hut app that allows users to order their Pizza from their own Facebook account – genius!

Tab-tastic

Your Facebook should act as a secondary website for your business and the tabs at the op are like your site navigation. Have a tab for your videos, your RSS feed, tab for products or services. You may ask how? Try the FBML application below & don’t forget the sidebar! Anything you can put in your tabs, you can also put in your sidebar. A newsletter signup form fits here nicely. So does a poll (another application you can add), affiliate banner, or set of links.

Getting the most from your Page
If you are lucky enough to be building a fan page for a brand that has a strong following, you have the perfect platform to launch a community. Engage with your fans and start the conversation. Use Facebook to get feedback and give your fans a sense of involvement, if they feel like you are listening to their needs they are more likely to engage. Ask questions like: “what’s your favorite product?” or “what could we do to improve our product?” Post updates weekly, if not daily and point your fans to any off-site promotions, such as giveaways hosted on different web sites.

This can be time consuming, but well worth it in the end. Keep sending out invites to new contacts asking if they want to be fans and constantly promote your page. If you want fans, you have to let people know you’re on Facebook. Put an icon or link in your newsletter, on your website or blog, in your email footer, everywhere.

And keep it fun! Nobody likes straight up business all the time!

**TIP** Do an email blast driving subscribers to your fan page. Post a blog about what’s happening on your fan page with an invitation to become a fan.

Posts & Updates
As with any other social media platform, its all about content and interaction. If you only post a few times a month, your fans will soon get bored and wont bother to interact with you anymore. Post every day or even several times a day to make sure you’re showing up in the news feeds of your fans. This can be links to your blog, product announcements, questions, news items, or anything your fans would be interested in.
Remember to send updates to your fans. The email feature is similar to your emails so be careful, you don’t want to spam and annoy your fans. Use it for your advantage to promote sales, new products and events.

**TIP** Every time someone becomes a fan, comments, clicks the “like” link, or shares your post, it shows up in that fan’s news feed for all their friends to see. So “viral” is built in.

Using FBML
FBML is the HTML editor app for Facebook. Search for the application Static FBML. THis will allow you to create basic HTML in the boxes and tabs on your page. The create thing about this app is you can create a landing page for your brand, to inform and engage the audience when they reach you.  For example, you can give a short description of your organization and tell people to click the “become a fan” button.

**EDIT** Tim has kindly posted below that Facebook is planning to reduce the available screen real estate for these tabs from 760px to 520px. Check out this post over at tutorial for Static FBML,

Get Social
Unfortunately your Facebook page wont grow to thousands or millions overnight (unless you are Nike!)  so plan to dedicate a few hours each week to getting new fans and updating content. You’ll quickly appreciate the instant ability to connect with customers and future customers through this social media tool!
There you have it folks, I hope that help. Thank you for Mashable and the Direct Creative Blog for their tips.

Identify the Type of Feedback

Straight Problems – Someone has an issue with your product or service and has laid out exactly what went wrong. This type of feedback is negative in the sense that it paints your business in a poor light, but it can be helpful in exposing real problems that need to be dealt with.

Constructive Criticism – Even more helpful is when the comment comes with a suggestion attached. Many customers — including some of your most loyal — will use social media to suggest ways in which you can improve your product or service. While this type of feedback may point out your flaws, and is thus negative, it can be extremely helpful to receive.

Merited Attack – While the attack itself may not be merited, the issue that catalyzed it does have merit in this type of negative feedback. Essentially, you or your company did something wrong, and someone is angry.

Trolling/Spam – The difference between trolling and a merited attack are that trolls have no valid reason for being angry at you. Also in this category are spammers, who will use a negative comment about your product or service (whether true or not) to promote a competing service.

Decide How to React

When dealing with Straight Problems, a response is almost certainly necessary. Whether that response is personal or a broad public-facing message depends on how widespread the problem is and how many people reported it. Regardless, if a real problem exists, steps should be taken to fix it and customers should be notified that those steps are being taken. Remember that there will be times when such criticism is the result of a perceived problem rather than an actual problem (e.g., someone who just doesn’t like the method by which you do something). Even this type of complaint should be given a response, if only to say, “Thanks for bringing it to our attention, but here’s why we do it that way.”

Similarly, Constructive Criticism also requires a response. Certainly there will be times when you won’t want to implement the suggestion given — probably most times you won’t — but you’ll build loyalty and trust by responding to criticism with a positive message. It is well worth the effort to thank those consumers who took the time to provide you with a suggestion or point out your product’s flaws.

Merited Attacks are a bit tougher to deal with, because they’re more likely to feel personal. You should always try to keep in mind that this type of feedback, as harsh as it may be, has a basis in a real problem. It is best to respond promptly and with a positive vibe (e.g., thank the commenter for the feedback and assure them that steps are being taken to correct the issue or mitigate their problem, such as offering a partial refund).

The final category is the only category of negative feedback that does not require a response. In fact, it is almost always best not to respond to Trolling or Spam. This type of feedback isn’t really feedback at all. It is designed either to bait you into an unnecessary and image-damaging fight, or to siphon off your customers using underhanded tactics. You should always ignore this variety of feedback, and when appropriate, remove it as soon as you spot it.