10 Social Media Benchmark Statistics: How are You Doing?

Sometimes it is hard to tell how your social media activity stacks up. Are you more active -- or less active -- than your peers? Is your target audience likely to be using certain social media over other social media -- say LinkedIn versus video? Are you taking the right steps to build your presence online, or would you get better results if you adjusted your steps?

This list of social media benchmarks may trigger some ideas to answer those and other questions:

• If you use a social media site* such as LinkedIn or Facebook, you are among the 46% of online adults in the United States who do.

• Are you using video to market your small business? Not sure i;s worthwhile? Well, consider this: 62% of adult American Internet users watch videos on video-sharing sites* such as YouTube.com.

• If your Facebook business Fan page has more than 100 fans, you are in the top 65%* of all users.

• 68% of business-to-business (B2B)* companies measure the success of social media based on how much traffic is sent to their websites. This is the number one measurement that B2B companies use.

• Those who exhibit social behavior on Twitter*- through use of words like-w' and'yo' and relationship-oriented words' tend to have more followers. So if numbers of followers are important to you, get social!

• The best time of day* to tweet if you want to get retweets is 4' 5 PM Eastern time.

• 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands* they follow or are a fan of.

• LinkedIn users are older and more affluent* than other social networks. Almost 70% have household income over $60,000 annually. Some 38% are 35-49 years old. Another 31% are 50 years old and above. If older affluent businesspeople is your target, LinkedIn could be a good place to find them.

• If you post at least one Twitter update per day, you are among the top 15% most active Twitter users*.

• If you have 100 Twitter followers or more, you are among the top 7% of Twitter users as measured by number of followers.

Surprised by any of these numbers? Remember, these are not hard and fast rules -- just interesting statistics that may help guide the direction of your social media activities.

For additional background, please also see these Business.gov Community articles about social media:

Getting Started with Social Media Marketing

Small Business Marketing: Making Social Media Pay Off for your Brand and Your Bottom Line

* * * * *

Anita Campbell is the Founder and CEO of Small Business Trends*, an online community serving small businesses.

* Hyperlinks to third party websites

About the Author

My name is Anita Campbell. I run online communities and information websites reaching over 4  million small business owners, stakeholders and entrepreneurs annually, including Small Business Trends, a daily publication about small business issues, and BizSugar.com, a small business social media site.