How Fast is Social Media Growing?

It’s so crazy to me how far social media has come in the past year. The number of social media sites seems to be increasing at such a fast rate, as I hear about new sites almost every month. Also, the number of users on these sites is increasingly drastically. Social media users today range anywhere from celebrities and professionals, to our peers, parents, grandparents and even our cousins still in grade school! To prove this point, Steven White researched how fast social media grew from 2006 to 2010. Click here to visit his Web site that can clue you in on how fast Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress and Tumblr are growing with detailed graphs and charts. To identify the main facts, Facebook grew from 12,000,000 users in 2006 to 500,000,000 in 2010. That's crazy! Twitter started with 1,000 users in 2006 and gained up to 145,000,000 in 2010 (White).
From personal experience, I interned at Greater Cincinnati Water Works during the summer of 2009, and when I came back for the next summer, some of my duties and assignments totally changed from researching how to utilize social media to being in charge of our Facebook page, YouTube Channel and Twitter account. Having experience with social media has given me a leg up on other candidates as I search for jobs. I was able to land two social media spring internships, one for the Ada Area Chamber of Commerce and one for the Eisen Agency. During job interviews, the interviewers seem so interested in what social media is, how it can be effective for their company, and what I know and like about it. Social media alone is beginning to create full-time jobs for people, i.e. social media specialists. Crazyness. Social media is continuing to grow and I’m very interested to see how far it goes in the next year.