I was recently doing some research on social media statistics to show a potential new client why they should be engaged, and was surprised to find so little written about it! Considering there seem to be a bajillion blog posts addressing the general topic of social media, I thought surely there would be more with some hard-fast number. People like numbers!

After much searching and much weeding through irrelevant numbers, here were the stats that I found to be most interesting. Let me know if you think I’m missing any good ones.

General stats: (per 2008 cone business in social media study)

• 93 % of customers expect that companies have a social media presence in some form.
• 85 % believe that these companies should use these services to interact with customers.
• 70 % of online adults use social media
• 56% of consumers believe that a company is providing them with a better service by interacting with them on social media sites.
• 60% of Americans regularly interact with companies on a social media site

Blogosphere stats

• There were over a 184 million blogs worldwide in 2008.
• 346,000,000 people around the globe read blogs. (comScore March 2008)
• 77% of active Internet users read blogs.

Twitter stats

• There have been 1,155,825,000 Tweets to date. You can find the up to the second tweet count here.
• According to Compete, the growth rate for Twitter was 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December 2008.

Facebook stats (per Facebook. See here.)

• More than 50 % of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 30 years old and older
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform
• There are a 150 million active users
• 700,000,000 photos are added to Facebook monthly
• There are 52,000 applications currently available on Facebook

YouTube stats (per the Future Buzz. See here)

• As of March 2008 there were 70,000,000  total videos on YouTube. (It seems safe to assume the number has grown considerably since then).
• The most popular video has received 112,486,327 views. (January, 2009)

LinkedIn (per Social Media Statistics Wiki. See here.)

• LinkedIn saw record traffic in September 2008 with 11.9M unique visitors, up more than 10% from August (10.8M) and a gain of 193% since last year.