Social Machinery

Social networking and blog sites accounted for 17% of all internet activity worldwide during last August. This means that every one out of six minutes online is devoted to social media activities according to Nielsen Company.

The popularity of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace is four times higher than 2005. On September 2009, Facebook reached 300 Millions users and also increased their user time spent on the site in more than 83% compared to last year.

Is also interesting to see that as people’s eyeballs are moving into social networking sites, advertisers are increasing their presence on this new media. Only last year,  brands spent more than 1.4 Billion USD on advertising in social networking sites. According to some analysts this number could double in the next two years.

According to Nielsen, there is a change on how people utilize internet. Even do watching multimedia content and messaging remains as the key activity for online users, there is change towards connecting, communication and sharing with people on the internet as the new values adopted.

Social media is growing very fast and generating content as consumers become an avid prodsumers. Just to exemplify this, every day more than 1.4 Million pieces of content are uploaded to Facebook including photos, messages, updates, status, video and other sources of digital information.