Facebook & YouTube Dominate Social Media

Networks - not just railroads, traffic lights, utility wires

With the continuing growth of mobile devices, led by smartphones and tablets, social media access is easier than ever. This is reflected in usage statistics. According to data from Experian, Facebook leads the way by a wide margin. For the week ending June 1, 2013, Facebook had over 2 billion visits, representing a 58% share. The next closest was YouTube, a distant second at 24%.

The remainder of the top 10 is comprised of (3) Twitter, (4) Pinterest, (5) LinkedIn, (6) Yahoo! Answers, (7) Google+, (8) Tagged, (9) Tumblr, and (10) Reddit. Even though all of these sites have less than 2% of total social media visits, over the course of a year, that translates to hundreds of millions to several billion visits each. 


The growth of social media has transformed business (Kodak was a top brand for many decades, until digital photography replaced film photography), weather (Twitter feeds and comments often were the quickest way to get updated information during Hurricane Sandy), news (real-time updates during the Boston Marathon and the days that followed led to thousands of leads as well as inaccurate reporting at times), nations (the change in Egypt is just one of many examples), and communications (text messages and video chat have supplanted "snail mail" to a great extent). Despite some challenges, the use of social media is now an integral part of our daily lives,and will be so for the foreseeable future.

---