First, let's look at traffic.

By: Don Crowther

You probably already know that traffic to social media sites has exploded over the last three years. But not many people know just how explosive that traffic really is. Let's look at a few facts...

First off, let's look at some hard data from Alexa.com... I showed these charts in my “No Secrets” video, but they're important enough to take another look at – and it's easier this way when they're not flying by in a video.

Let's start with Facebook... it seemed to come out of nowhere, and now it has almost as much traffic as
Google:



Now let's look at Myspace vs Google... you can see that Myspace actually beat the mighty G during much of 2007:

And did you realize that YouTube has almost twice as many monthly page views as Google?

And look at the trends on the graphs. Remember, these social media sites are growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, they are pretty much doubling every six months. Just imagine where they're going to be in a year or two.

Here's something else that's going to make you sit up and take notice...

According to Comscore, a highly trusted global Internet research company, in a typical month:
• Just under 2/3rds of everyone who goes online worldwide, visits MySpace
• And 29% of them visited Facebook
• 35% of them visit YouTube
• And 27% of them visit Wikipedia

And like I just mentioned, this all becomes even more important when you realize that the number of active users for most of the social media sites doubles every 6 months.

Facebook is currently adding more than a million visitors every week!
And this is not just a bunch of kids. Well over half of all MySpace visitors are older than 35. And a huge percentage of the growth at Facebook is coming from adults. There are now over 100,000 Facebook users who are older than 64!

And I mentioned this in the video... it's important is to realize that social networking is much larger than the MySpace and Facebook sites that most people think about. In fact, our SMARTS database now contains over 1,920 different social media sites. And we add more nearly every day.

An excerpt from: Smarts Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0: A Quick and Easy Plan for Surviving [ And Thriving ] In A Social Media World