You’re trying to keep up.  You never pick up a newspaper anymore cause the news in there is old.  You’re hooked into your Blackberry (or iPhone or Palm) and you write on your blog every week.  You get hundreds of emails a day and you communicate with your family via text message.  You have arrived in the Internet age… or have you?  What’s this “social media” that everyone’s talking about?  Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and (gasp) Twitter… those are for “the kids”.  Not so fast folks.  These things are here to stay.

A Forrester Research report last month showed that social networking has actually surpassed email in terms of time spent online.  SURPASSED EMAIL!  Let’s look @ some numbers (courtesy The Nielson Co., June 2009)

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/
U.S. Unique Monthly Visitors (June 2009): 87.3 million
Year-Over-Year Growth: 198%
Average Time Spent (Monthly): 4 hours, 39 minutes, 33 seconds

Think of this as a high school reunion that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  You connect with people by “friending” them (essentially confirming that you know them).  How much you share with your friends, family and co-workers is up to you.  Many people post photos, tell stories and use the applications (games) available from the site.  Many companies now have Facebook pages which allows them to push content to their “friends”.

MySpace – http://www.myspace.com/
U.S. Unique Monthly Visitors (June 2009): 62.8 million
Year-Over-Year Growth: 6%
Average Time Spent (Monthly): 2 hours, 26 minutes, 58 seconds

While it’s not growing NEARLY as much as the other 3 on the list, MySpace should not be overlooked.  It’s the “Godfather of Social Media” as it the first one to really take off.  Similar to Facebook in many respects users connect to one another and then determine what of their personal info to share.  Videos, songs, photos, etc. all pop up on MySpace.  These days MySpace tends to have a slightly younger demographic than Facebook and is geared toward the music/band crowd.

YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/
U.S. Unique Monthly Visitors (June 2009): 87.7 million
Year-Over-Year Growth: 22%
Average Time Spent (Monthly): 1 hour, 12 minutes, 57 seconds

I’m sure I’m not introducing you to YouTube for the first time.  It’s “the video site” where you can go and watch just about anything from TV/movie clips and trailers to home videos.  Most folks don’t think YouTube when thinking about social media but make no mistake – it’s a player in the social media landscape.  Recent changes to YouTube allow users to link to friends (and by extension their videos).  Users can also “subscribe” to content to ensure that when something new gets posted they’ll be notified.

Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/
U.S. Unique Monthly Visitors (June 2009): 21.0 million
Year-Over-Year Growth: 1,928%
Average Time Spent (Monthly): 31 minutes, 17 seconds

You’re reading it right… 1,928% increase.  Twitter is a difficult one to grasp for some people.  I like to describe it as “texting on steroids”.  All “tweets” are messages no more than 140 characters in length.  There’s no photos, videos or games (though you can link to photos & videos).  Like the others, you choose to “follow” other Twitter users and then you’ll receive their tweets when sent.  You can be passive (just watching the tweets fly by) or active (tweeting on your own).  Twitter is a great inexpensive way to get a viral message out to a huge audience VERY quickly.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

So now you know the major players are you scared?  Does it mean that just cause everyone else is doing it you need to too?  Probably not.  The bottom line when it comes to social media is that you need to be active.  There’s nothing worse than a blog, Twitter or Facebook account that has been opened and is never updated.  It shows people that you don’t care.  Also, once you enter into this space you need to keep track of what other people are saying about you.  If you don’t think you can hang with all of these listed above start with one… see how you like it and go from there!