Econsultancy has put together a snapshot of some of the statistics floating around about social media usage and compared it to six months ago.

Regardless of all the bookmarking tools there are around, I’m always losing track of figures like this when I need them so I thought I’d whack them on here and I’ll always be able to find them - maybe you’ll find them useful too.

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
• There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.Okay, so now some new stuff that’s worth considering when looking at social media marketing that I’ve not included in previous posts:
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Something else interesting came out this week from Neilson (reported on Mumbrella) that showed Australians are the most prolific users of social media in the world. Apparently we here down under spend on average nearly 7 hours a month on social networking sites compared to the UK and the US at just over 6 hours.

There’s one more interesting figure I came across today and that is the growth of Facebook users in Oz - according to Facebook’s advertising information, there are nearly 8 million Facebook users in Australia (see full details on Laurel Papworth’s post here).

And if that isn’t enough stats for you for one day, check out this very extensive (and seemingly real-time) overview of Facebook usage worldwide at CheckFacebook.com.

The first of a series of worldwide Media 140 mini-events was held in London last week - here’s an interview with Carve’s Managing Partner, Paul Harrison, by Glenn Le Santo from the night.

Paul talks about how many corporates are now realising that social media will not go away and are being driven mainly by fear and the idea they are missing an opportunity. The fear, he says, is that their brand is being defined by people external to them. Paul also says that companies are realising that if they get social right, it is the most powerful, unprecedented opportunities to engage their customers in dialogue and the best ones are starting to get it.

Here’s a bit of background about the Media 140 mini-events from the Media 140 website:

These mini-events will focus on journalism, brands, advertising, media, technology, politics, the third sector and education. They are aimed at getting individuals from diverse backgrounds together to share their experiences over good food and drink, meet industry professionals and learn from case studies.

Media140’s meeting in the Square Mile was attended by some of social media’s top minds, personalities that may one day turn out to be the Jobs, Wozniaks or Gates of this brand new industry’s future.

Here are my picks of the best reads last week about things you should consider if you are responsible for your brand’s reputation online.

Please note: A big hat tip to Gavin Heaton (or @servantofchaos) who provided the insipration for this post. His weekly “5 must read posts from last week” are great reading which is probably why, totally unwittingly when I posted this last night I managed to completely (almost) plagiarise his blog post title - funnily enough, that being the topic one of the must-read posts he links to on an earlier list.

1. How brands should manage their reputation online

Some of the biggest names in social media gathered together at Blogworld expo last week. This post covers highlights from one of the panel sessions including some level headed advice from Amber Nasland at monitoring specialists, Radian6 such as “social media didn’t invent criticism” and that organisations should have emergency plans in place (Vegemite’s iSnack 2.0 leaps to my mind here).

2. The Top 10 free tools for monitoring your brand’s reputation

One of the most important things to do if you are responsible for your brand’s reputation online is to know what people are saying about you and this article reviews some of the easily accessible, free tools to listen to online conversations.

We must remember that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent. That means we can choose whether to be observers, participants or outcasts

3. Top 5 Twitter Trends to watch right now

Once you start monitoring conversations going on about you / your brand / your organisation you’ll realise quickly that many of these are taking place on Twitter.

Here’s a great article that includes insights about Twitter trends from blogger, author and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki as well as PR2.0 guru Brian Solis.5.

4. Managing your reputation through search results

This post from the Google blog has some tips on what to do when you aren’t that happy with what you find when you type your company’s name into Google. These include thinking twice before you publishing anything online and if there’s something you don’t like - contact the source of the information (and there are some tips on how to do this) as well as proactively publishing positive information.

5. Damage Control: Social Media Reversals

Renowned web strategist Jeremiah Owyang identifies and analayses three case studies in this post looking at how organisations should respond to a social media crisis: “assert themselves and be proactive - even during a crises”.

I just discovered Gary’s social media count (when I saw his tweet that it has, quite literally, been an overnight success - 400 RTs in last 24 hrs). The awesome little app shows just how amazingly fast the social web is constantly and rapidly growing:

Here’s a bit of background from Gary Hayes blog post about the count below:

More about the Count - I quickly built and coded the app based on data culled from a range of social media sources & sites at the end of Sept 2009. The design will be finessed and I will be adding extra functionality (such as week, month & year lookahead/backs plus dynamic data input).

The social web has exploded in the last year and below are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’ is based on (many will be updated!).

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)

• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)

• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)

• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)

• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)

• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)

• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!

• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)

• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)

• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)

• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)

• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Okay so these are US figures (from Forrester) but it is still pretty compelling: 3 out of 4 adults who use the internet fall into this ’spectator’ social media category - those who consume social media but don’t contribute. How many people do you know who don’t use the internet?

Even if your friends, colleagues, boss claim not to use Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, chances are they fall into this ’spectator’ category (watch videos, read blogs, customer ratings etc) which Shel Holtz looks at in his post, “Less than 20% of online adults don’t use social tools”, so over to him.

As someone with a PR background, I have to say I thought this survey that showed PR people leading social media engagement in most companies in the US was pretty interesting but I did have a little giggle when I saw it was carried out by the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) and ipressroom (an online PR tool). The headline result was unlikely to ever be, “IT department leads social media use in companies”. Does a survey lose credibility when it clearly supports the proposition of the people who paid for it?

Interesting article in The Age today claiming Facebook will be merely a footnote in social networking’s history and for those who doubt the impact social networking will have, those who are are “just waiting for this social media fad to pass” and “making sure it proves itself before we get involved”, this video I saw on Craig Wilson’s post this morning about this video from Socialnomics might be of interest (nb sources aren’t quoted but maybe they are in the book?).

It’s quite long so if you don’t make it to the end, here’s some highlighted stats:

Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million listeners

TV took 13 years to reach 50 million viewers

Internet took 4 years to reach 50 million users

Facebook in 9 months added 100 million users

25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are links to user-generated content

>200 million blogs / 34% post opinions about brands / 78% consumers trust peer recomedations / 14% trust advertising

more than 1.5 milion pieces of content (web links, blog posts, news stories etc) are uploaded to Facebook daily

I found a great resource today: The Top 100 Best Social Media Books, ever by Jurgen Appelo which is a pretty impressive feat considering he’scovered everything the novice to the expert might be intersted in and rated them all against several criteria.

I came across this list thanks to David Meerman Scott, who has no less than two books in the top 10 and (for our Australian readers) will be out in Aus in September to conduct social media masterclasses - a great opportunity to hear from the author of bestselling World Wide Rave and the new rules of Marketing and PR.
Great to see Melbournian, Darren Rowse, come in at Number 14 with Pro-Blogger: Secrets for blogging your way to a six figure income - a must for anyone who’s serious about making money out of blogging.

But if you are intersted in learning about social networks from a business and corporate point of view and how to use these tools to build and manage your reputation online you might want to have a look at Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents which I’m looking forward to reading when it arrives on my doorstep from Amazon. He’ll also be speaking this September (it’s a busy month down under) with Darren Rowse, and a heap of other other social media gurus like Laurel Papworth aka silkcharm, at the Marketing Now! conference.

Anybody on Twitter will have noticed the huge #welovenhs debate over the last few days following the rather uncalled for attack by US Republicans, who were trying to bring down Obama’s healthcare reforms. If you want the whole story, the Guardian will tell you all you need to know in the article it published today.

As a French national, I certainly don’t think the NHS is in any way perfect (and nor is the French healthcare system by the way, for those of you who may think I’m partial!), but I must admit I am quite taken by how proudly the Brits on Twitter have responded to the attack. After all the United States have more than 45 million people with no health insurance at all: that’s nearly 16% of their whole population! Anyway, this isn’t what this post is about. I just wanted to draw attention to how social media is changing the way people are able to voice their reaction to an event. With the twittervese leading the charge, comments are flowing on news sites like the Guardian (see link above), and at least one Facebook group has been created so far. A proper demo of cyber-citizenship!