The Social Media Effect

by Jay Markunas, Career Coach

The social media effect has been an incredible phenomena. According to the popular YouTube Video below, Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 internet activity. 1 in every 8 married couples met via social media. Amazingly, it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, 13 years for TV, and less than a year for Facebook (it actually reached over 200 million people within 1 year). 80% of companies use social media for recruitment. Technology has certainly accelerated our access to information, and social media has grown exponentially.

Just a few years ago, if you were looking for a job the first place to go would be Monster or CareerBuilder. Currently, Monster.com gets about 10.8 million unique visitors per month. CareerBuilder gets slightly more at 13.5M visitors/month. Facebook currently receives a whopping 125.8 million unique visitors per month. Twitter receives 28M visitors/month, and LinkedIn gets 13.2M visitors/month. Today to look for a job many are turning to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Companies have information pages, job postings, and networking opportunities all built into one site on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

I remember hearing years ago the reason market share was dwindling for digital cameras, portable CD/MP3 players, and flip-style phones was the usability studies on those devices showed the younger generation wasn’t willing to carry three devices when they could get all those features in one device. Indeed many of the technology companies (pioneered by Apple) have combined these devices. Now I carry one single device that has a phone, mp3 player, and a still camera + video camera……and I bet you do too.

I love the quote in the following video by Eric Qualman: ”We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media. The question is how well we do it!” Enjoy…..

Be Sociable, Share!

•