50 social media stats (from Commentz)

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1. “About two-thirds of US respondents have seen a QR code. Of those surveyed, about half who saw a QR code, used it according to the MGH study.” (Heidi Cohen)
2. “Nearly six in 10 moms have a smartphone, vs. 50% of all internet users. Overall, 62% of mom respondents told BabyCenter they use the mobile internet regularly, up from 22% just two years ago.” (eMarketer)
3. “In July 2010, Foursquare had 2 million users performing 1 million check-ins per day. By the end of the year, that number had risen to 5 million users performing 2 million check-ins per day. Impressive growth, yet this means check-ins per user declined from 0.5 per person to 0.4. It also suggests that many of those five million users aren’t active.” (RWW)
4. “A survey conducted in the fall of 2009 found that more than half of all journalists turn to sites like Twitter for story research. (Keep in mind, 2009 is ages ago in social media time, so this number is likely to be significantly higher in 2011.)” (@prtini in Mashable)
5. Each month, Facebook’s 500 million users share more than 30 billion Web links, blog posts and other content. (SFGate)
6. “According to new research conducted by Echo Research, ‘A Gendered Press,’ three quarters of all news journalists are men while women make up just a third of journalists covering business and politics.” (MediaPost)
7. “Almost 20% of visits to company sites are prompted by social media, whereas less than 1% come via direct links, according to ForeSee study.” (InformationWeek)
8. “In its recently released Internet Security Threat Report for 2010, Symantec noted more than 286 million variants of malware in 2010, and a 93-percent increase in Web attacks.” (GMA News)
9. “During a three-month observation period in 2010, 65% of the malicious URLs observed on social networks were shortened URLs.” (GMA News)
10. “Ninety percent of marketers surveyed say that social media is important for their business, with the self employed and small business owners with two or more employees ‘more likely to strongly agree,’ says the 2011 Social Media Marketing Report, which surveyed some 3,300 marketers.” (Inc.)
11. “43% of Facebook users who “unlike” a brand do so because of too much push marketing – Exact Target.” (Jeff Esposito)
12. “Most trending topics don’t survive beyond 40 minutes or so, the most dominant, longer-lasting trends were those that took hold over diverse audience members.” (Huffington Post)
13. “Amazon is the most reputable company in the US, according to the sixth annual list from advisory firm Reputation Institute (RI), in partnership with Forbes Media. It is the first time an online company and retailer has topped the 150 Most Reputable Companies rankings. Rounding out the top 10 are Kraft Foods, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Kellogg, UPS, FedEx, Sara Lee, Google, and The Walt Disney Co.” (PRWeek)
14. “Forrester Research predicts that B2B firms will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009.” (TopRank)
15. “In February 2011, daily Tweets averaged 140 million (140 FTW) almost 3x the 50 million Tweets sent every day this time last year. On March 11th in the wake of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, Tweets flew to 177 million.” (Brian Solis)
16. “Only 40% of the [Fortune 50] even mention their social media presence on their homepage.” (Marketing Pilgrim via Advertising Age)
17. “Although women now comprise roughly half of American workers and earn nearly 60% of university degrees, only 24% of the people heard or read about in print, radio and television news are female.” (PRsarahevans.com)
18. “More than half of adolescents log on to a social media Web site at least once a day.”  (BusinessWeek)
19. “Nearly one-quarter of teens say they log on to their favorite social media sites 10 or more times each day.” (BusinessWeek)
20. “[LinkedIn is] now growing at roughly one million new LinkedIn members every week, the equivalent of a professional joining the site at faster than one member per second.” (LinkedIn)
21. “Only 58% of tweets come from official Twitter clients, according to new data from Sysomos.” (Mashable)
22. “Email is 38% bigger than Twitter, while Google services represent 7.2% of all sharing.” (StartUp Meme)
23. “Buyers who purchase or convert online are almost as likely to use a combination of search and social resources (48%) as they are to use just search (51%) along the path to purchase.” (eMarketer)
24. “1 in 4 college textbooks will be digital by 2015.” (RWW)
25. “It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to hit 1 billion Tweets. Now it only takes 1 week for Twitter to syndicate 1 billion Tweets.” (Brian Solis)
26. “38% of Small & Micro Businesses would use social media more if they had more time or a convenient management solution –  Vistaprint” (Jeff Esposito)
27. “Over the last six months, 40% of sharing through Facebook occurred on the event page (pre-purchase) vs. 60% of sharing which occurred on the order confirmation page (post-purchase). This tells us that the motivation to share is higher once the purchase is made and the attendee is committed.” (Eventbrite)
28. “In surveys conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 34% of respondents said they read news online within the past 24 hours (as opposed to 31% who favored newspapers); and a full 41% said they get most of their news online, 10% more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper. Of course, the 18-to-29-year-old group overwhelmingly cast their vote with the web; 65% said the Internet was their main news source.” (Mashable)
29. “According to a recent survey by ForeSee Results of 10,000 online shoppers, social media interactions are the primary influence for only 5% of the people who visit retail websites.” (BNET)
30. “Thirty-one percent of trending topics are retweets, according to the HP research.” (Huffington Post)
31. “Although the awareness of Twitter is nearly universal (more people have heard of Twitter than could possibly access it), the growth in usage appears to have slowed somewhat, rising from 7% of Americans 12+ one year ago to 8% today.” (Brand Savant)
32. “According to a separate Nielsen survey, 31% of U.S. mobile users now own smartphones, and a Pew survey shows nearly half of cellphone users download and use mobile apps, too. In PopCap‘s research, more than half (52%) of 2,425 respondents said they had played a game on a mobile device, whether their own device or someone else’s, at some point in their lives.” (Mashable)
33. “87 percent of journalists want their press releases via e-mail.” (Ragan’s PR Daily)
34. “In the US, there are 149M active Facebook users, 70% log in once a day – Ogilvy & BuddyMedia.” (Jeff Esposito)
35. “80 percent of U.S. businesses with 100 or more employees will use social media marketing this year.” (iMediaConnection via eMarketer)
36. 40% of all tweets come from mobile devices (WSJ
37. “96% of Twitter users follow fewer than 500 people.” (BrandSavant)
38. “According to the latest trends released over 44% of all sharing activity online occurs on Facebook, which is over 33% what it was last year.” (Startup Meme)
39. “In fact, a new telecommunications administration report, Digital Nation 2010, says that about one-third of U.S. households still lack a broadband internet connection. Furthermore, 5% to 10% of Americans only have access to internet services that are too slow to even support a basic set of online functions, such as downloading Web pages, photos or video.” (CNN Tech)
40. “Voters are increasingly turning to such [social media] sites to learn about politics, with more than 1 in 5 doing so before November’s midterm election, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.” (LA Times)
41. “U.S. brands could gain $27 billion in 2011 by bringing consumers simpler experiences and interactions, according to the findings of the Siegel+Gale 2010 Global Brand Simplicity Index.” (Burrelles Luce
42. “On New Year’ Day 2011, 4 seconds after passing midnight in Japan, a new Tweets Per Second (TPS) record was set at 6,939.” (Brian Solis)
43. “For the time frame of Jan. 1 through Jan. 17 of this year, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut and Chick-Fil-A all had average first-time responses under 1:30 [measuring Facebook and Twitter].” (Social Media Explorer)
44. “The most popular third-party apps were TweetDeck, accounting for 5.5% of all tweets and 13.1% of all tweets from non-official apps, followed by UberSocial and Echofone, all of which are owned by UberMedia.” (Mashable)
45. “According to the study, 91 percent of journalists said that having easy access to relevant background, bios, and supporting information is very important when researching a story. Eighty-seven percent said high-res images are very important, and 76 percent cited verbiage from a press release.” (Ragan’s PR Daily)
46. “On February 1, 2011 (the day the Internet was turned back on), Egypt gained 100,000 new Facebook users.” (Grow)
47. “Google Analytics (GA) is used on more than 28% of all websites.” (PRsarahevans.com)
48. “The researchers used 16.32 million tweets to identify the top 22 users that were generating the most retweets for trending topics. ‘Of those 22, 72% were Twitter streams run by mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the New York Times, El Pais and the BBC,’ HP wrote.” (Huffington Post)
49. “Social media accounts for ~ 25% of all time spent online over 35 minutes per hour – Nielsen.” (Jeff Esposito)
50. “Just one in five small businesses uses social media. Here are the forums these companies use: 73% Facebook or other networking site, 28% blog, 23% Twitter.” (WSJ)