Woah. That’s a lot.

My boyfriend isn’t falling for it though. He steadfastly believes that it just isn’t for him, despite my repeated attempts to get him to join.  But still, he is not fully without social media. His one and only golden jewel of social media is his Instagram account, a social media app for iPhone and iPad that allows you to take and share pictures with friends.

Regardless of the Kyle’s (aka: non-Facebookers) of the world, it’s hard to deny the power of social media for business and for pleasure.

Sarah Evans of AdAge.com collected an impressive array of social media stats that I found thoroughly impressive. I thought I’d share some of my favorites with you to start off your weekend of social media posting (You can see the article here for source info).

• Business to Consumer Facebook results are 30% higher than average on Sundays.
• 23% of overall internet usage is devoted to time spent on a social networks or blogs.
• What people are retweeting: 92% retweet interesting content, 84% retweet humor, 66% retweet personal connection, 21% retweet celebrity status, 32% of retweets offered incentive and 26% of retweets were because some asked them to “Please RT”.
• Auto-posting things to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70%
• There are over 100 million active Twitter users. 40% of which aren’t actually Tweeting but simply reading what is going on in their feed.
• 95% of Facebook Wall posts by fans are not answered by the brands walls they post on (!!)
• Consumers who use social media apps (Twitter, Foursquare, Urban Spoon etc) dine out more often and are more likely to be return customers.
• 20% of Google searches made every day have been NEVER been searched for before.

As you can see people are really using their social media! And it helps to be aware of some of these statistics to better utilize social media for your business. The above statistic that states that 95% of wall posts by fans are not answered by brands (Source allfacebook.com) boggles my mind! I understand that some brands are huge and inundated with wall posts, but social media (and marketing) is all about relationships and sending someone a thanks or answering a question can be a great way to connect with a new or existing customer!

Paying attention to how and why people are using social media is the first step to creating and leveraging social media that works for your business or organization.

So keep reading!

To check out more interesting social media statistics visit the AdAge.com article Stats of the Day: 50 New Social-Media Stats to Kick-start Your Slide Deck.

For additional social media  fun you can follow me on Twitter @jenniejacobs or  Web Marketing Therapy @WebMarketing_RX

Other benefits:

* Preview metrics and page titles for bitly and bitly Pro links before you click them.
* Receive instant notifications about your trending bitly links.
* Shorten links on Twitter.com with a single click.

• TweetFeed.com: A customizable page that displays related Twitter activity live.

• TweetChat: TweetChat helps put your blinders on to the Twitter-sphere while you monitor and chat about one topic.

• TweetReach: TweetReach analyzes the tweets that match your search.

• Klout: Compare your Klout with connections on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

• Hashtracking: Track Campaigns, Measure Reach, Calculate Influence, and Create Beautiful Presentations

• TweetLevel: TweetLevel is a Twitter measurement tool

• Tweet Grader: Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded.

Tweet @NickiG for more social media support and I will tweet and blog my answer!

In the article, 10 Words That Will Increase (or Decrease) Your Twitter CTR, Dan shared the result of his research on 200,000 link-containing Tweets. Some of his results might surprise you (it surprised me!)

Words and Phrases to Avoid

The following words and phrases were found to lower CTR in Tweets with links:

1. @addthis” which is a signature for the Tweets that come from the automated AddThis sharing functionality.
2. Tweets that mention the word “marketing” have a lower CTR than Tweets that don’t mention it.
3. @GetGlue system have a lower CTR than Tweets that don’t come from that system.

More words to avoid
Read The 20 Least ReTweetable Words by Dan Zarrella to find more words to avoid using in your Tweets.

Words or Phrases that help drive traffic to your site:

1. Tweets from the online newspaper paper.li that contain phrases such as “Daily is out” had much higher CTRs than Tweets that did not.
2.  Tweets using the word “via” had a higher CTR.
3.  Tweets specifically directed at a person tend to have a higher CTR
4.  Tweets with “RT” in them had a higher CTR than those that did not.
5.  Tweets with “Please”
6.  Tweets with a specific call-to-action (like “check out this link”)  seems to result in a higher CTR than not doing that.

Interesting, eh?  Thanks Dan for sharing your research with the rest of us!

After analyzing thousands of press releases, the study shows that while more press releases are shared on Facebook, each share on Twitter results in 30 percent more views.

Their findings also indicate adding multimedia elements to your press release such as photos and video can increase your engagement up to 3.5 times. See infographic from PR Newswire and Crowd Factory below