Babel blog - random thoughts from the Babel team

Details: Written by Sam Tring

Social media is becoming well recognised as a key tool in building up one's reputation, especially from a business perspective, as it is a good idea to have a solid relationship with the customers you are targeting.

Is there someone in your business that you need to convince? Here are some facts which really prove just how important social media channels are, and just how much scope for coverage you can achieve.

Facebook:

1. Over 25 billion pieces of content such as news stories, blog posts, photos and so on are shared in a single month on Facebook

2. More than 150 million people use Facebook on external websites every month

3. There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices

4. On average, a single Facebook user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events

5. Facebook fans spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Even this article Facebook's power should worry us all... published a mere two days ago, highlights Facebook's reach to every corner of the internet.

Twitter:

1. Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users each day

2. More than 600 million searches are made on Twitter in a single day

3. A third of users access Twitter via their mobile phone - so constantly on the go!

4. Twitter began as a simple SMS service

5. There are over 110 million users of Twitter's services

Not sure you have enough to say on Twitter, or believe it will be a struggle to fit it all into 140 characters? Well it's true what they say "a picture can tell a thousand words" – be inspired by this video Twitter: Picture what's happening now

LinkedIn:

1. LinkedIn, as well as having over 70 million users worldwide, LinkedIn's members come from more than 200 countries from every continent

2. LinkedIn is used by over 80% of companies as a recruitment tool

3. Every second a new member joins LinkedIn

4. 1 in 20 LinkedIn profiles are recruiters

5. It is available in six native languages German, French, English, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish

Marketo's Blog has the reasons nailed down to a T, describing social media as the "cornerstone to opening the door to new leads and bolstering existing ones", read on 5 Reasons to leverage LinkedIn to increase your B2B prospects

YouTube:

1. Over 2 billion viewers visit YouTube each day

2. It would take around 1,000 years to watch all the videos listed on YouTube

3. Back in June 2006, more than 65,000 videos were being uploaded every day and this figure will increase as people begin to market themselves much more

4. Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube

5. It is available in 19 countries and in over 12 languages.

Not sure how you can use it to the best advantage for your business? GigaOm previously listed 34 Ways to use YouTube for business - it really puts things into perspective.

Blogging:

1. Over 77% of internet users read blogs - you're reading ours, someone will read yours

2. One in five bloggers update their blogs daily

3. 14% of blogs are from corporate personnel

4. Technorati has a list of over 133 million blogs in their directory

5. Bloggers use other social media to their advantage with an average of five different social sites used to drive traffic to their blog

The key things to remember with blogging are to post often, use catchy titles, engage with the audience and make your blog informative (what do you want the audience to gain from your blog?) These tips proved to be quite helpful for us, so we will pass them on to you, Power Blogging

danielle s ian s