About Social Media 1

Social media continues its rapid growth due to its networking possibilities. To follow the growth and change of these sites, I read the following sites:

(1)  Social Media University is written by Lee Aase who is the manager for Syndications and Social Media for the Mayo Clinic.

(2) Searchrank has a chart ranking the social media sites with MySpace owning 81.92% of the market share and Facebook owning 7.24%. This site reports Marketing Vox reported the market shares of photo sites.The leading photo hosting website is PhotoBucket which increased 43% while visits to Flickr increased 49%, and visits to YouTube were up 249%.

(3)  Mashable posts about how to find statistics on social media. The post states “The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released the results on the usage of social media in the Inc. 500. Of note here, “Just over one quarter of the Inc. 500 reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy in 2007. That number has increased to 44% just one year later.” Mashable has a chart showing the increase in growth among unique visitors worldwide. It reports that Comscore released statistics of the growth of social networking worldwide.

(4)  The Comscore site also includes the monthly total unique visitors between June 2007 and June 2008 with the % of change. It reports about facebook, myspace, hi5,  friendster, orkut, bebo, and skyrock network.

(5)  Disruptology is written by Aaron Uhmacher on social media who is a peer media consultant. His site shows in his FriendFeed the ways he uses the social media to make contact in several places. His tumblelog page reminds me of another interest of mine–visual thinking.

(6)  One thing I always recommend to beginning bloggers or people who want to make money via blogs is to set up a web strategy. One of the best posts I’ve seen about this is web-strategist by Jeremiah Owyang in “How To Get Noticed”.

(7) The link for the top 100 social media and social networking blogs by Laura Milligan is at virtualhosting. You begin to get an idea of how huge social media is.