( A Fifteen minute read)

The internet has loosened our collective grasp on the truth.

It is a fact of the internet that ( with a new social media user, every 15 seconds,) every click, every view and every sign-up is recorded somewhere.

So what exactly is Social Media:

Is it a term relating to gatherings of people that prefer to exist in groups?

Or

Is it the dustbin of idle world gossip.

Not on your Nelly> With billions of people glued to Facebook, Whats App, We Chat, Instagram, Twitter, Weibo and other popular services, social media has become an increasingly powerful cultural and political force, to the point that its effects are now beginning to alter the course of global events.

This is what it is to-day:

Social networks earned an estimated $8.3 billion from advertising in 2015.

• A 2011 study by AOL/Nielsen showed that 27 million pieces of content were shared every day, and today 3.2 billion images are shared each day.
• On WordPress alone, 91.8 million blog posts are published every month.
• It’s estimated that video will account for 74% of all online traffic in 2017.
• Google processes 100 billion searches a month.
• 91.47% of all internet searches are carried out by Google.
• 60% of Google’s searches come from mobile devices.
• To carry out all these searches, Google’s data centre uses 0.01% of worldwide electricity, although it hopes to cut its energy use by 15% using AI.
• By 2014, Google had indexed over 130,000,000,000,000 (130 trillion) web pages.
  

  

  Facebook statistics

  • Facebook adds 500,000 new users every day; 6 new profiles every second.
  • 79% of all online US adults use Facebook.
  • 76% of Facebook users check it every day.
  • The average (mean) number of friends is 155.
  • Half of internet users who do not use Facebook themselves live with someone who does.
  • Of those, 24% say that they look at posts or photos on that person’s account.
  • There are an estimated 270 million fake Facebook profiles.
  • The most popular page is Facebook’s main page with 204.7m likes. The most liked non-Facebook owned page is Christiano Ronaldo’s with 122.6m.
  • There are 60 million active business pages on Facebook.
  • Facebook has 5 million active advertisers on the platform.
  • Facebook accounts for 53.1% of social logins made by consumers to sign into the apps and websites of publishers and brands.

  Twitter statistics

  • 500 million people visit Twitter each month without logging in.
  • There is a total of 1.3 billion accounts, but only 328 million are active,
  • Of those, 44% made an account and left before ever sending a Tweet.
  • The average Twitter user has 707 followers.
  • But 391 million accounts have no followers at all.
  • There are 500 million Tweets sent each day. That’s 6,000 Tweets every second.
  • Twitter’s top 5 markets (countries) account for 50% of all Tweets.
  • It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to go from the first Tweet to the billionth.
  • 65.8% of US companies with 100+ employees use Twitter for marketing.
  • 77% of Twitter users feel more positive about a brand when their Tweet has been replied to.

  

  You tube statistics

  • 300 hours of video are uploaded to You tube every minute.
  • People now watch 1 billion hours of YouTube videos every day.
  • More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices.
  • The average mobile viewing session lasts more than 40 minutes.
  • The user submitted video with the most views is the video for Luis Fonsi’s song ‘Despacito’ with 4.36 billion views.
  • YouTube sees around 1,148bn mobile video views per day.
  • In 2014, the most searched term was music. The second was Minecraft.
  • 9% of U.S small businesses use Youtube.
  • You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages (covering 95% of the Internet population).

  Instagram statistics

  • There are 800 million Monthly Active Users on Instagram.
  • Over 95 million photos are uploaded each day.
  • There are 4.2 billion Instagram Likes per day.
  • More than 40 billion photos have been shared so far.
  • 90 percent of Instagram users are younger than 35.
  • When Instagram introduced videos, more than 5 million were shared in 24 hours.
  • Pizza is the most popular Instagrammed food, behind sushi and steak.
  • 24% of US teens cite Instagram as their favourite social network.

  

  Pinterest statistics

  • Pinterest has 200 million active users each month.
  • 31% of all online US citizens use the platform.
  • 67% of Pinterest users are under 40-years-old.
  • The best time to Pin is Saturday from 8pm-11pm.
  • In 2014, male audience grew 41% and their average time spent on Pinterest tripled to more than 75 minutes per visitor.

  LinkedIn statistics

  • LinkedIn has 500 million members.
  • 106 million of those access the site on a monthly basis.
  • More than 1 million members have published content on LinkedIn.
  • The average CEO has 930 LinkedIn connections.
  • Over 3 million companies have created LinkedIn accounts.
  • But only 17% of US small businesses use LinkedIn.

  Snapchat Statistics

  • Snapchat has 178m active daily users.
  • 60% of them are under 25.
  • In 2016, $90m was spent on Snapchat ads.
  • 47% of US teens think it’s better than Facebook, while 24% think it’s better than Instagram.

  That’s your fill of social media statistics for now, with just a tiny fraction of the weird and wonderful stats and facts available out there.

  It’s easy to get dragged into the drama and other negative aspects of social media.

  Social media is built for polarisation and extremes.

The basic engagement mechanisms of popular social media sites like Facebook drive people to think and communicate in ever more extreme ways.

Social media is a collective term for all the websites and online services that are erasing national borders and distances.

Social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.

They are used to spread information about dramatic events or to warn others about risky routes. When refugees reach a new country, they can also use social media to contact their fellow countrymen who are already there and find out about things like permits, authorities they can turn to or what things cost.

They have subsumed and gutted mainstream media.

They have undone traditional political advantages like fund-raising and access to advertising.

They are destabilizing and replacing old-line institutions and established ways of doing things, including political parties, transnational organizations and longstanding, unspoken social prohibitions against blatant expressions of racism and xenophobia.

They are helping to create surprisingly influential social organizations among once-marginalized groups. For Example : Brexiters in Britain to ISIS in the Middle East to the hacker collectives of Eastern Europe and Russia.

Each network in its own way is now wielding previously unthinkable power, resulting in unpredictable, sometimes destabilizing geopolitical spasms.

Through this new technology, people are now empowered to express their grievances and to follow people they see as echoing their grievances.

THE QUESTION IS:

IS SOCIAL MEDIA NOW THE JUDGE AND JURY AND THOSE THAT RUN ITS ALGORITHMS ARE NOW THE REAL WORLD POWER BROKERS.

If it wasn’t for social media, I don’t see TRUMP AS PRESIDENT OF THE US.

This has to be the scariest ACHIEVEMENT about Facebook/ Twitter.

Not that Facebook may be full of lies (a problem that could potentially be fixed), but that its scope gives it real power to change history in bold, unpredictable ways.

But that’s where we are.

It’s time to start recognizing that social networks actually are becoming the world-shattering forces that their boosters long promised they would be — and to be unnerved, rather than exhilarated, by the huge social changes they could uncork.

This should come as no surprise.

Facebook and Twitter have become the new TV, where businesses can’t control their messaging as they once were able to do with TV ads.

In a way, we are now living through a kind of bizarro version of the utopia that some in tech once envisioned would be unleashed by social media.

Online campaigns directed at GOVERNMENTS OR FOR THAT MATTER AGAINST BRANDS can be a lot more effective than writing. Pay-to-play strategy by letting posts run and gain organic traction before boosting them.

Efforts to fight this dismaying trend are obviously worth pursuing, but is it time to give our due to the new political activism – Social Media. The king of communication.

As it becomes increasingly commercialised there is a risk that people – particularly young people – will see social media content as being politically and commercially independent.

What it means to get caught in a Twitter storm. Facts tell, but stories sell.

In actual fact, the very opposite is true.

When you sign up for Facebook, you also accept a business model that can use information about what you do and how you feel, for example in marketing.

One terrifying example is how the terrorist group ISIS uses social media to recruit new supporters. Potential ISIS fighters can be invited to join private Facebook groups where they are put into contact with individuals who are active in Syria.

However if used in a responsible manner it s also a new tool for democracy.

More people can express their views and form opinions. There are also examples of individuals who have quickly succeeded in raising large sums of money for those in need.

The Impotence of Social Media is in its nucleus accumbens. 

People tend to follow the behavior of the group.” If other people have liked a post, new viewers will be more likely to like it too. And that popularity can feed on itself, changing their behavior to try to get social approval, respond to headlines without any in-debt knowledge of what the headline refers to. 

A single ‘like’ can make a social-media post more popular.

Many social media sites share more of the higher-ranked — or more popular — posts. As a result, “people are more likely to see what others have positively rated,”  what’s in those photos is socially acceptable.

Skip pictures with few likes.

Likes can have a subtle but significant effect on how teens interact with friends online.

The important take-home message here, is that Social media shapes how we perceive the world around us.

When people express themselves through social media, they communicate collectively.

Members of social media communities direct raw emotions into particular interests. These audiences show their interest and approval by liking, sharing and commenting. And those mechanisms drive future social media behavior all driven by algorithms that drive participation and attention-getting in social media, the addictive “gamification” aspects such as likes and shares, invariably favoured the odd and unusual.

What are the results?

How polarised and divided nations are becoming.

The smartphones and web applications were increasing people’s

passions while also driving them to polarising extremes.

Political figures around the world are more polarised.

Language is more crude.

Sharing is becoming competitive, pushing participants to one-up each other.

Where Facebook or Twitter (viewed on mobile devices) has become for many people the sole source of news. Article will have a MUCH higher chance of converting to a sale!

You’ve engaged them, you’ve educated them, you’ve entertained them with social networks. (Communities of people (or animals) that are interrelated owing to the way they relate to each other.)

In humans, this can involve sharing details of their life and interests on Twitter or Facebook, or perhaps belonging to the same sports team, religious group or school.

I rest my case.

The functions of social media have transformed into something we have never anticipated.

Social media has transformed into political tools, increased global awareness, and offered a quicker way to spread information.

People have the power to abuse social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to promote radical ideas. So what.

Once you gag people’s right to speak freely, you place a mental shackle on the subconscious mind.

If you want to influence others to act upon what you have to say, treat social media communications with the same degree of importance as those that are face-to-face.

Social media to a great extent is a reflection of life. Without education for the sake acquiring knowledge the mind looks for it else where.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.