Two years ago I declared that the future of social media had arrived and that the battle was over. A report had just come out from Forrester saying that 80% of online US adults (which is 90& of the general population) were using social media.
But then just last week the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report that only half of US adults were using social networking sites. Huh?
Well first off we have the difference between, lies, damn lies and statistics (which is a famous quote attributed to Mark Twain (who I don’t think said half of what he’s said to have).
Second off you have the fact that each study uses sample sets to represent the broader population and both are actually wrong, even if they are “statistically accurate” (see the before mentioned quote).
Thirdly, you have the difference between social media and social networks. Social media is the nice big vague term that can include everything from blogs to Twitter to YouTube, to anything that’s mildly social or media. Social networks tend to be the more clearly defined social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. There can be some confusion here because sites like YouTube are social networks but you don’t have to have an account or have a network with the service to watch videos.
So I think it’s completely accurate to say that 80% of online US adults use social media, because who doesn’t read blogs (even the ones from major publications like WSJ & NYT) or watch videos on YouTube?
But it’s also within the realm of possibility that only 50% of online US adults use social networking sites (although I find it hard to believe that number isn’t higher).
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