Social Media Is Bigger than Porn: Why Aren’t You on Board?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of social media, but if you’re like many of the people who contact me, you may be wondering:

a) Is it a fad?, and

b) Is it a worth investing time and money from my business?

In answer to the first question, I often quote a number of statistics to show the growth and impact of social media, but the one that I think says it all is this: Social media has replaced porn as the #1 online activity (Reuters).

This fact alone should allay any fears that social media is a fad, but in case you’re still concerned, take note that this study was done over two years ago, and social media has only gotten bigger since then. In fact, in 2010, The Nielsen Company reported that, if all U.S. Internet time was condensed into a single hour, over 20 minutes of that hour would be spent on social media (including blogs)—up 43 percent from the year before—and over half of that hour would be spent communicating online (social media, e-mail, and IM).

Surely, these figures indicate that social media is here to stay. (And remember, certain people once thought the Internet was a fad, too.)

As for whether social media is worthwhile as a business activity, that’s a harder question to answer because it depends a lot on the business and the social media strategy. In general, though, if you’re in a business that relies on a target audience (and who isn’t?), you’ll likely find that audience online, and you’ll almost certainly find them more receptive to messages delivered via social media than to traditional marketing methods. After all, according to a Socialnomics video, 78 percent of social media users trust peer reviews, but only 14 percent of TV watchers trust ads.

You know your business, but if you don’t know social media, it’s worth doing some research and even consulting an expert to see how your business can profit from this new, growing mediasphere. After all, as Erik Qualman says, “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.”