Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

GETTING STARTED

How can you get started with social media? As noted earlier in this chapter, don’t just look at number of users; look at where your users are and what they are doing. They may be spending more time on Facebook, but are they looking at photos of their nieces and nephews or asking their friends what car to buy? LinkedIn certainly has more users than Etsy, but if you want to reach serious knitters, Etsy is the place to start.

But at least for the social networks you likely hear about most, here are the numbers:

• Facebook is the largest social network in the United States as of late 2011, with more than 800 million total users and 600 million active each month. More than 50 percent of the U.S. population has an account (although more than 75 percent of Facebook users are outside the United States).14
• Twitter has more than 200 million users and more than half log in daily, for a total of 250 million tweets sent each day.15
• LinkedIn has more than 135 million users in more than 200 countries, and it predicts 4 billion searches for people on their network in 2011.16
• Google+ had more than 40 million users as of the third quarter in 2011, just before opening the network up to business pages.17