• More than 4 in 5 American who are active online visited Social Media websites within the last month
• About a quarter of all time spent online is using Social Networks & Blog sites, more than twice as much as the next nearest category of websites.
• Facebook is by far the most popular social networking website globally, and in the U.S. Tumblr is among the fastest growing
• Growth in social media users comes from people of all ages and increasingly among those aged 55+, making social media more representative of the online population overall

As a member of Nielsen’s global communications team (full disclosure), I helped research and write this report, working together with our thoughts leaders/experts and designers to create compelling data visualizations that help convey Nielsen’s insights into consumer behavior.  The response to the report has been overwhelmingly positive, with coverage by key news media and thousands of links shared across social networks. Of course all ideas/opinions expressed on this site and in social media are my own (and are not necessarily shared by my employer), so hopefully you find the analysis and insight in this report as helpful as I do.

Visit the Nielsen’s website to read the Social Media Report and download a copy of your own.

Since Twitter was a start-up it has fostered a strange fascination with numbers: 140 characters, following-to-follower ratios, and a whole ecosystem to measure RTs and @’s from influential people.  Since I’m a communications professional working with social media, I’ve made it my business to try using many of these measurement tools, both for clients and my own (perhaps narcissistic) profiles.  Of course numbers only tell part of the story of interpersonal influence; gross popularity means less than the net of mutual friends who can trust each others’ judgment.

I share this fascination with measurement, especially in understanding interpersonal influence. As a result, my use of Twitter has been synonymous with my professional growth at the beginning of my career, charting my own progress all the while.  On this blog alone I’ve written about Twitter nearly a dozen times; to date search results for “Twitter Internship” bring the most organic visitors to this blog. My use of Twitter is frequently the first thing people learn about me, often before we’ve ever met.

So to celebrate tweet #8888 (88 is sort of a lucky number of mine), I wanted to thank 8 followers on Twitter who have been following me since the beginning (or at least the longest):

• @CourtneyChesley – My first follower, who introduced me to Twitter in September 2007. She’s really creative, smart to boot, and is one of the most generous people I’ve met through social media.
• @GeekDave – Dave’s a blogger I met as another blogger in STL; naturally we have a lot in common. Geeky is the new hip, as far as he’s concerned.
• @Lolololori – Lori is a passionate advocate for the things she loves – music, local culture, and online media – as thusly serves as a role model to all of us.
• @BillStreeter - Bill continues to be an early adopter, probably making him the biggest social media rockstar I know online and IRL.
• @LaurenReid – The better half of my social media relationship status was also the first person I convinced to join Twitter.  Though reluctant adopter at first, Lauren probably has the most social media savvy of anyone I know.
• @BarackObama – What, really? I’m a little skeptical of this, although Twitter insists his account is among the longest of my mutual followers. His own mastery of new media in a campaign inspired a whole generation of my peers, and led me to persue political communication in DC the fall of 2008.
• @Bitca - My long lost friend from a past social media life (on a social network which no longer exists) is an early adopter, occasional geek, and a one woman force-to-be-reckoned-with.
• @CMaue – Chris Maue is my colleague from the class of 2008 at Webster University, creative companion, and eventual inheritor of my Highway 61 (revised) legacy.  He’s never afraid to try innovative tools for himself, and has earned the right to call me out on my own BS.

I think @GBullard probably belongs somewhere in that list, alongside these other early followers who are Honorable mentions: @socialthing, @ioubeer, @NaomiSilverArt, @LisaRokusek, @StephenTColbert, @PubDef, @TwitPic, and @TheRoyale

In addition to qualitative measurement of these long standing social media relationships, I found a few surprising quantitative results:

• I made 1224 tweets before I gained my first 88 followers on May 12, 2008
• I gained my 1000 follower @DrakeTex on March 19th, 2010
• I joined Twitter 931 days ago (September 15, 2007), and like most others on Twitter my audience grew most over the last year.
• #PRcamp is my most frequently used hashtag- 35 times -before, during, and following the event in November 2009.
• I’ve earned at least 533 mutual followers out of the 775 I’m following.  Over 70% of these contact might be considered my friends on any other social network!
• I was retweeted the most during #PRCamp, where I reached a potential audience of 8839 through RTs from 6 other participants.
• At least 16% of my tweets are replies to other users, and another 7% are RTs, which help share good ideas and offer feedback.
• Over 50% of my tweets come from Twitter clients rather than on Twitter.com, as most other users do. This usually means site visits through Twitter links will be difficult to distinguish from organic or direct traffic.

Perhaps its not surprising then that Twitter itself is on of the most frequent subjects I discuss using Twitter, wherein the medium is also the message.  Let’s consider this an ongoing conversation that I invite you to join by following me @MattHurst on Twitter.

Coincidentally 2009 marks the first 10 years I’ve been using this network of computers we call the Internet, in many ways I could have never anticipated using. Yet somehow New Media Strategies knew where things were heading years in advance.

This summer I had the unique privilege to gain hands on experience at NMS as an intern/online analyst, learning first-hand what online brand promotion and protection mean today (and some ideas about the future). Working with corporate clients from both Fortune 500 companies and Non-profits alike, I learned how Word of Mouth marketing carries influence; I was called a “Social Media Power-User”. Working with NMS was different than any other internship I had heard of, especially since I was given all the same responsibilities they expected of their entry-level employees.

Most importantly I contributed valuable research and report writing along with my team members, using online communication as a sort of public focus-group style audit to measure opinion and perception, and on at least one occasion to avert a crisis. These experiences were my primary responsibility at NMS, and helped me understand how to identify (and sometimes create) discussion in many valuable and unexpected venues; in many cases the majority of conversation took place outside of Facebook, and most of it cannot be found using a simple Google search.

Working at New Media Strategies I also met great people, who I’m looking forward to recognizing for their work, as I will describe in upcoming case studies of our work with clients. In the meantime I would like to thank NMS for the unique opportunity they gave me, and to congratulate them on their first 10 years on the Internet.