December 14, 2011 How “Social” is Social Networking? Social networking is somewhat of a misnomer, because in reality, there’s really not much “social” about it. Being “social” is about getting to know someone through conversation and establishing a connection over time—it’s not only about visiting a Facebook page. However, in our technology driven-world, it feels like computers or smart phones are the main interaction methods. We use Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with everyone from grandparents to former classmates to our children. It makes things a lot easier, right? We have access to all these people at the click of a mouse or the touch of…
September 28, 2010 A Real-Time Look at Social Media Growth Recently, I ran across an interesting experiment put together by Gary Hayes, a web programmer and blogger. Using Flash, Gary created a social media “counter” that tracks, among other things, how many Facebook postings, tweets, and YouTube uploads are taking place in “real time,” based on the most recent growth rate data available for social media. The application itself is pretty remarkable, and so are the numbers Gary uses to run his calculations. For example, every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Every day, 50 million tweets are sent via Twitter. An incredible 900,000 blog posts are…
September 20, 2010 Understanding the Real Life Social Network When you hear the growth figures for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Facebook recently surpassed 500 million users (that’s half a billion, folks – more than the populations of the US, Canada, and Mexico combined), and Twitter reports 300,000 new accounts per day. With all the chatter going on in the social sphere, what can small businesspeople like us do to keep from becoming just so much white noise? For starters, we need to put the numbers in context. Just because there are 500 million users on Facebook, that doesn’t mean we need…
