Are you one of those people who just don’t get the hype surrounding the social media bandwagon? Do you think platforms like Facebook are an irrelevance? Do you fail to see why it’s necessary for your business to have a social media presence? Well, if you do, then something happened last week that may cause you to reassess your assumptions.
Facebook announced that its site had been visited by over one billion users. So what, you might think? It might be a big number, but how does that impact on me? Well, what made this epic was that the 1 billion visitors all logged into the site on the same day. Why’s that so remarkable? Well, that number represents one-seventh of the world’s population. Imagine only a fraction of that number stumbling upon something your business might’ve shared that day, and you can see just how valuable a business marketing tool Facebook potentially could be.
It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise however, as Facebook’s numbers have been steadily rising globally. Even though the western world is ‘apparently’ tiring of the whole social media phenomenon, the numbers continue to rise regardless.
Facebook claims that half of the world’s estimated online population now check in to the social networking giant at least once a month. It has reported that number of people who use it at least monthly grew 13 per cent to 1.49 billion in the three months to the end of June this year. To get some sort of perspective on that, that number is equal to half of the estimated 3 billion people who use the internet worldwide. What’s more, Facebook claims well over half of these users (65 per cent) now access Facebook daily.
OK, so the numbers of registered users is impressive, but surely these figures will have to plateau at some point? Social media being transient and fickle, surely something else will come along to unseat Facebook from the top table? Well, probably at some point, but until then Facebook is still the king of the castle for private users and for businesses.
The indications are that the social media behemoth will continue to grow. Mark Zuckerberg’s stated aim is to ‘connect the whole world’, and he shows no signs of slowing down in his quest to achieve that. Certainly Facebook usage has probably almost peaked in the USA, Europe and India, but the world is still a big place. Facebook has got plans to expand into Africa, much of Asia and some of Latin America.
Given the unqualified success of Zuckerberg’s former student network, it would be a brave man who placed a bet against him achieving world domination. If you run an online business don’t you want to be part of this social explosion? Don’t you think it’s time your business embraced the concept of social marketing?
