250 Million Members Later: Social Media Shows Big Picture for 2010

This past weekend I overhead a woman discuss with her friend how “ridiculous” Facebook was and how she would never use it in a million years. I just smiled to myself as I tapped away on my Blackberry, and thought about how many times I’ve heard similar comments from social media “non-believers."

It made me think about how this woman’s “never in a million years” attitude towards social media hinders people - especially business professionals - from achieving success. Social media quickly engages and connects people on a global scale, and markets your company’s brands in innovative and cost-effective ways.

Her comment made me wonder why people still fight the “social networking system” – an online networking system that is clearly working.  People who choose to bury their head in the sand, that’s their prerogative but statistics don’t lie - especially when staring you right between the cyber eye. You can’t dispute what happened with the big social media players this year:

• Look at Facebook’s history: In December 2004, there were one million active Facebook users.  In 2006, Facebook members jumped to 12 million. In the beginning of 2010, Facebook had 250 million users. In just five years, Facebook users grew 250 percent. Not too shabby, Mark Zuckerberg.

• The number of Twitter users increase by 300,000 people per day. Twitter gets more than 3 billion requests each day, generated by over 180 million unique visitors. Twitter users send more than 55 million tweets per day (640 tweets per second).

• Twitter has donated access to tweets to the Library of Congress for research and preservation. So if you market your business via Twitter, your tweets are literally a part of history in the making!

• 85 million LinkedIn members represent 200 countries and every continent. Executives from all Fortune500 companies are LinkedIn members. – that is a LOT of global professionals interacting with each other on a daily basis.

For the woman who touted Facebook as “ridiculous,” I suggest that she join social media-savvy Planet Earth.  Maybe if you spend 24,7 on your Facebook, that might be a bit ridiculous but there is nothing ridiculous about social media and where it’s headed in 2011.