Social Media Royalty

I was not up at 4:30 this morning watching the Royal Wedding, but I did see a recap of the grand event on E! News.  During this show, they had a live count of how many times Prince William or Kate Middleton were mentioned on Facebook or Twitter. As I was watching, about two million people from all over the world tweeted about the newlyweds. The number was increasing by roughly 30 people every second.

Even before the wedding began, the online buzz surrounding the Royal Wedding exceeded the talk and discussions of the Japan earthquake. As of two hours before the ceremony and in the last 30 days, 911,000 tweets were recorded, which is equal to more than 30,000 tweets per day, according to Webtrends. This web analytics company also discovered there were approximately 217,000 Facebook status updates and 145,000 blog posts about William and Kate’s wedding day. Well, make that at least 145,001 blog posts now.

An article by Ben Parr entitled, “The Social Media Buzz Behind the Royal Wedding,” has some great statistics. About 65% of the social buzz is coming from the U.S., while only 20% of tweets, blog posts and Facebook updates are from the U.K. Canada is in third place with 2.6%. Twitter is where most of the online community is chatting about the Royal Wedding at 71%. Facebook has 16.9% and blogs take up 11.3%.

All these tweets, blogs and status updates are only expected to increase because people are now wanting to discuss the aftermath of the wedding – what Kate’s dress was like, where’s the honeymoon, how was the party, etc.

The social media world is being dominating by Royal Wedding news today and days to come.

Three Important Social Media Sites

Many people my age are too wrapped up in Facebook and Twitter they forget to join and create profiles on other social media sites. Geoff Livingston wrote an informational article today called, “Are you ignoring these 3 important social media sites?”

As my peers and I are entering into the workforce and the ‘real’ world, I think everyone should create a LinkedIn profile. I know you all have heard of LinkedIn and most likely know what LinkedIn is all about, but what you may not know is over 100 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities. This is an awesome way to network and find a job. This is also a way to control your professional identity online (which sometimes Facebook does not help with this). LinkedIn is a simple, yet professional way to keep in touch with former and present employees and classmates. Most young people don’t understand that we can truly power our career from a LinkedIn profile. Livingston states LinkedIn is in intense competition with Facebook and Twitter, but somehow LinkedIn “keeps it coming.”  

The second social media site Livingston discusses is YouTube. Although YouTube has been around for about six years, more than 1.2 billion videos are watched by 89 million Americans every day. We can expect to see more video demand and less text-heavy media on the Internet. Livingston claims that YouTube is more powerful for social media communications than Twitter, in some cases. Also, there is no better place to practice marketing than the largest video social network. At my past two internships, I have created a YouTube channel for the businesses and produced, edited and shared my informational videos with the entire YouTube network.

The last social media site everyone should join in StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon takes you to web pages, photos and videos handpicked by your friends and like-minded people. This is the one site that I have not joined yet, but I do plan to sign up. My friends are always 'stumbling' and constantly share funny videos with me. StumbleUpon recently gained a few million new users, with more than 15 million accounts total. Livingston claims that this site is the ultimate in surfing, which means if you can foster a strong community, and then you will see dramatic increases in traffic. Also, StumbleUpon could be a more productive effort then retweets.  

All of these sites are free and allow you to build your own community on the Internet.