Most people think that Facebook and Twitter is just for the "young folks", but both of my parents, grandparents, and many of my aunts and uncles all have a Facebook account (and they use it more than I do!). The appeal of Facebook comes simply from being able to share photos and information with your friends and loved ones. For me, Facebook is my number one way to advertise for this blog. It's useful in many ways, but also frustrating in almost as many. The layout is constantly changing making it harder and more structured to navigate. Games and all sorts of applications like Farmville are crowding the website, driving me as a user further and further away. But, no matter how much we complain and groan about the ever-changing Facebook, we all use it. Businesses feel the pressure to create a Facebook page just to keep up with the social media trends, and they're probably right. With Facebook constantly expanding, sometimes I just have information overload and need to take a break. Many of my friend's statuses suggest the same thing. Stupid Mark Zuckerberg. He created this love-hate, overly dependent, relationship and I've been sucked into it. 
Twitter, on the other hand, does not impress me or thrill me nearly as much. Although I do have a Twitter account for this blog, I use its SOLELY for the purposes of letting people know what I am writing about and any new things that can be found on my blog. I do not see the appeal of a Twitter account otherwise, unless you are a celebrity. Celebrities have Twitter accounts to provide the "personal" relationship with their fans and I'll admit I do "follow" Taylor Swift and Ellen Degeneres. For some reason, however, the normal people in society feel that Twitter makes them a celebrity and that they must update us on every waking minute of their life from getting ready for school, to eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, to walking their dog after dinner. No, I (we) do not care.
Below, I have some social media statistics from the year 2011 that help showcase the social media overload our society is experiencing. (Courtesy of http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/09/02/20-stunning-social-media-statistics/)
20 Social Media Statistics
These figures reveal the huge black hole that our time disappears into when we visit Facebook, Twitter or YouTube or other social media sites.
- One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook ( This number is calculated by dividing the planets 6.94 billion people by Facebook’s 750 million users)
- People spend 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
- Each Facebook user spends on average 15 hours and 33 minutes a month on the site
- More than 250 million people access Facebook through their mobile devices
- More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook
- 30 billion pieces of content is shared on Facebook each month
- 300,000 users helped translate Facebook into 70 languages
- People on Facebook install 20 million “Apps” every day
- YouTube has 490 million unique users who visit every month (as of February 2011)
- YouTube generates 92 billion page views per month (These YouTube stats don’t include videos viewed on phones and embedded in websites)
- Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years)
- Wikipedia hosts 17 million articles
- Wikipedia authors total over 91,000 contributors
- People upload 3,000 images to Flickr (the photo sharing social media site) every minute
- Flickr hosts over 5 billion images
- 190 million average Tweets per day occur on Twitter (May 2011)
- Twitter is handling 1.6 billion queries per day
- Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users a day
- Google+ has more than 25 million users
- Google+ was the fastest social network to reach 10 million users at 16 days (Twitter took 780 days and Facebook 852 days)
Now, I'm not saying that social media is bad, but don't you think this all might be a little too much?
Let me know what you think by participating in my poll! (found on the right hand side of the page)
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