Читать книгу Manage Your Online Reputation - Tony Wilson - Страница 7

In July 2010, Facebook reported that it had more than 500 million registered users; if it were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world after China and India. (By 2015, it may surpass both!) Facebook states that the average user has 130 friends, and that people spend more than 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. Its users share more than 30 billion pieces of content each month. The average user is connected to 80 pages, groups, and events, and creates 90 pieces of content monthly. Fifty percent of Facebook’s active users log on every day. Interestingly enough, only 30 percent of Facebook’s users are in the United States. There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through mobile devices such as BlackBerrys, iPhones, and other mobile telephones. Facebook’s own statistics show that people who use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook as laptop or desktop users. You wonder why television is dying? Everyone’s eyes seem to be on their computers accessing Facebook and other social networking sites.

Whereas Facebook is for friends connecting with other friends, LinkedIn is for businesspeople connecting with other businesspeople, whether for jobs, business opportunities, profile upgrading, or other networking where one knows that other businesspeople will be looking. It had 75 million registered users in 2010.

Facebook and LinkedIn aren’t the only social networking sites that people belong to and use. What social networking site you use depends on where you are in the world, and what you’re looking for in a social networking site (i.e., business, pleasure, music, dating, shopping), your age, your occupation, your first language, the “market niche” of the site, and what network your other friends and contacts are using. There’s Bebo, MySpace, Friendster, hi5, orkut, PerfSpot, Yahoo! 360°, Zorpia, Netlog, Sales Spider, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Classmates, Xanga and many more (especially if you include all the dating sites). In fact, Apple launched Ping, a music social networking site the day I wrote this paragraph. However, in this book, I’m going to concentrate on Facebook because it seems to be the one site where everyone “is” and where everyone makes the most mistakes. At least until something else comes along to replace it.