07 Nov Is Social Media the Coke of Personal Communication?

According to Nielsen, total social media time spent in the US increased a whopping 37% from July 2011 to July 2012, from 88 billion to 121 billion minutes. That’s an average of 7.4 hours for every single person in the US aged 10 or older. That’s over 14.3 minutes a day, while we spent only 9.6 minutes on email, snail mail and telephone combined.

Of the 44 daily minutes we spend on communications of all types, including face-to-face conversation, more than 1 in 4 was those is spent via social media. Coke likes to think that instead of competing with other companies, its ultimate goal is to surpass water as the world’s leading beverage. (Dasani, anyone?) In those terms, social media is starting to become the water of communication among degrees-of-separation people networks (Americans still watch roughly 3 hours of TV a day).

And within the continued move toward social media, time spent on mobile apps and the mobile web increased 63%. Worldwide, Facebook now has 157 million mobile-only users, a group growing 25 million a quarter. With ever-improving, ever-affordable mobile products for the masses, this trend is going to continue for the foreseeable future. So while you’re thinking, “I really need to get our social media strategy more developed,” don’t forget that a mobile component is a must-have within that plan.

Marketing through social media has been around for a while, but theoretically it’s still in the early stages of an ultimate place in our way of communicating. As humans continue to transform their attitudes toward and usage patterns of social media, organizations which recognize, appreciate and plan for this ongoing evolution will keep succeeding. Those which don’t will either struggle to keep pace in our ever-modern world, or may just cease altogether.