Below are interesting statistics on social media usage. Feel free to share your favorite social media statistics in the comments section.
- $7.25 billion was spent in online advertising in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2010, a 15.9% increase over the fourth quarter of 2009 (Source: eMarketer)
- 200 million accounts on microblogging service Twitter (Source: Twitter)
- 26% decline in profit for The New York Times in the fourth quarter of 2010 compared to the fourth quarter of 2009 (Source: The New York Times)
- $1.07 is the cost of acquiring a Facebook Fan via advertising on the social network (Source: Webtrends)
- 49.4 billion minutes were spent on Facebook in December 2010, a 79% increase over December 2009 (Source: comScore)
- 78% of small businesses use Twitter to market themselves while 75% use Facebook and 30% use LinkedIn (Source: Postling)
- 70% of retailers use Facebook to promote their business, up from 50% last year (Source: MerchantCircle)
- 46.6% of Twitter users are ages 18 – 34, a 9.4% increase from the previous year (Source: comScore)
- 37% of retailers list Facebook as their most effective source of marketing (Source: MerchantCircle)
- 32% of businesses are promoting themselves through Facebook Places, with another 12 % planning to do so in the coming months (Source: Financial Times)
The data below is not for all retailers; it is just for the “small and local business” MerchantCircle surveyed during its quarterly Merchant Confidence Index survey of over 8,500 small and local business owners across the U.S.
“70% of retailers use Facebook to promote their business, up from 50% last year (Source: MerchantCircle)”