Category: video

In this latest video, I talk about the statistics of facebook and twitter use, as well as the demographics of the people who use them. This is really vital information to bear in mind when deciding whether these websites should be part of your non profit’s social media strategy.

Transcript:

This is a video from Connect, Communicate, Change…social media for the non-profit sector at www.connect-communicate-change.com

Hi. This is Philippa Willitts for Connect, Communicate, Change; social media for the non-profit sector. Today, I want to talk about the usage of social media and whether it’s a passing phase or it’s worth investing some time and energy into. Now, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I can think it’s worth investing your time and energy into! Although the methods of social networking do change over time, for instance, a few years ago, Myspace was huge, it was what many, many people used to share music and to connect with each other, whereas these days hardly anybody uses it. It’s primarily still used to some music sharing website but most people aren’t there anymore. These days, they’re on twitter and they’re on facebook mainly.

So is it worth it? I’m going to look at twitter and facebook as examples because they are the biggest social media sites around at the moment and sure, in a few more years time, this may have changed again but that doesn’t mean make it not worth doing now. And I’ll explain why…

So, twitter. On average, 460,000 new twitter accounts are created every day. So that’s nearly half a million new people are joining twitter every day. This is worldwide. There are an average of 140,000,000 tweets sent per day and a billion tweets sent per week. Now that’s quite huge, that’s awfully high numbers that show that this is not something that is going to die out soon. The other interesting thing about twitter is not just its daily new accounts and daily number of tweets but the difference when there is a breaking news story. For instance, when Michael Jackson died, the number of tweets sent reached a record 456 tweets per second when that news was breaking.

So twitter is adaptable, people go to it when there’s something to say, and something that is interesting when you are using social media for fund raising is that twitter users have a higher income on average than the general population, and quite significantly higher actually. 47 percent of twitter users earn 50,000 dollars or more a year, that’s 47 percent, compared to the 33 percent of the general population, and 24% of twitter users earn more than 75,000 dollars a year compared to the 18% of the general population. So that’s something to bear in mind when you’re planning a social media fund raising events or campaigns.

Now, facebook – obviously the other big player in social media. Now facebook has more than 800,000,000 active users so that’s not even including people who do not use their accounts. And not only are there 800 million active users, but more than 50% of those log on to facebook in any given day. So that is an awful lots of people using this one website which gives it the potential to make an incredible impact, if used well, as part of your organization’s strategy of social media.

And not only that, but people on facebook are very interactive. They like joining groups, they like liking pages, they like on planning events on facebook, sharing photos. So it’s not at all a passive experience using facebook, people like to interact with what’s on offer. Now back to the statistics: more than one person in every 13 on the earth are on facebook actively. That’s mind blowing! More than one person in 13 are active facebook users, half of which are logged in everyday. 28% of an 18 to 34 years old check facebook on their phone before they get out of bed in the morning. The 35+ demographic now makes up 30% of facebook’s user network, which shows that it’s not just a young people thing, it’s not just something that young teenagers do, but it’s something that over 35s do, in considerable numbers, which again is interesting for the demographics of your campaign and possibly for fund raising because that groups is most likely to have disposable income.

In terms of America, 71% of internet users in America are on facebook. 71 percent…Again, that’s a huge group of people that if you work well in facebook, you have the potential to be in contact with, which will give you an incredible influence. And in America, more people search for the term ‘facebook’ than anything else, and that has been the case for the last two years. So hopefully, these facts and figures will reassure you that it really is worth taking the leap and getting your organization involved in social media activities so that you can have a chance of interacting with the more than half a million twitter users that join everyday, who have a higher income than average, or the more than 800 million facebook users, 400 million of whom log on every day.

These sites as well as being ways that you can waste time and ways that you can play games, are also ways that you can have huge impact and reach out to organizations, to people who could help you raise money, to people your organization could support, and to raise awareness of your campaigns. Thank you for listening.

Thank you for watching. Visit our website at www.connect-communicate-change.com for information about, and insight into, social media for the voluntary and not-for-profit sector.

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