2009: The Rise of Social Media

I can recall when Robert Scoble the famous American blogger best known for his blog, Scobleizer had a few thousand followers on Twitter he was king and it was a big deal. Now Twitter is 100 times more popular and Ashton Kutcher, or aplusk as he likes to call himself, has more than 2 million followers (he is currently the TwitKing… or KingTwit ;)

Okay, so I’ve taken a cheap shot at Ashton (in all fairness, he seemed like a cool guy on CNN last week) and you’re wondering where I’m going with this. Well, my point is that this is the year of Social Media. In 2009, the growth of nearly every aspect of Social Media continues to be enormous and it shows no sign of slowing down.

Let’s continue to use Twitter as our prime example and look at some astonishing statistics. Twitter grew at a swift, monthly rate of 77 percent from February to March and by 1,382 percent year over year! According to Nielsen, Twitter attracts nearly 7 million unique visitors each month. At that pace, Twitter will have almost 100 million visitors by this time next year - Woooowzaaa!

Finally, for all of you skeptics that think Twitter is just a phase, let’s look at the big picture: Nielsen’s latest online research shows that social networking is now more popular than email. According to the study, 66.8% of Internet users use social networks, while only 65.1% use email.Remember when we had all of those cynics who refused to open a Facebook account? Well they eventually did.Are you still holding out on Twitter? Believe me, you’ll give in sooner or later…