Here’s a few statistics that I’ve gleaned from various sources that would say that it definitely isn’t!
1: Social networking sites are officially the most popular sites on the internet after porn sites.
2: 2/3 of the global internet population visit social networks.
3: Time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall internet rate.
4: 87% of sales come from referrals. The average person is exposed to 3000 advertising messages per day. Only 14% of people trust advertisements whilst 78% of people trust the recommendations of other consumers.
5: Facebook is the 3rd most trafficked website in the world.
6: As of November 2010, with more than 500 million active users, if Facebook were a country, it would be world’s third largest after China and India.
7: Over 50% of Facebook’s active users log on in any given day and on average people spend over 200 million minutes per day on the site.
8: People are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
Based on all that, it’s clear that a company should have a presence in the social web! To end I’ll leave you with a quote from one my favourite marketeers:
“Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.” – Seth Godin