Looking Back at Social Media in 2010

Looking Back at Social Media in 2010

By Sheldon Levine - Thursday, December 30th, 2010 at 9:54 am   ShareThis

For any of our readers that have ever used MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform you would have noticed that the default search term when you log in set to “social media”. We do this because it’s a nice general term and it highlights what we do here at Sysomos, search social media.

Since 2010 is coming to a close we thought it might be interesting to use that search term to take a look at what the past year looked like in social media. So without further ado, here’s some interesting stuff we pulled fromMAP using the search term “social media” to look at the now closing year.

The first thing we found, which is actually quite astounding, is just how much social media was talked about this past year. A look at our popularity chart shows the number of blog posts that contained the term social media over the past year. We see that while social media was a popular topic all year long, the talk about it rised fairly steadily all year.

Our world map shows us that social media was a hot topic world wide as well. We can see here concentrated regions of talk coming from major world cities, but not just major cities.

By drilling down even further we can look at which countries were talking about social media the most. No surprise to us was that the majority of the talk was coming from the US with 45.3% of the conversation. Coming in a distant second was the UK with 11.4% of the conversation and followed by Canada (4.8%) and India (4.5%).

Next we decided to look at which age groups were talking about social media. While most people think of social media as something for younger people our system showed that surprisingly it was the 35-50 year olds that were talking about it the most with 41.3% of the conversation. The 21-35 year old crowd (which I thought would have dominated ) held 37.9% of the conversation. The under 20 crowd may be big users of social media, but they speak the least about it with only 6.8% of the conversation.

A quick look at our gender breakdown showed us that, from users whom disclose their information, men were dominating the conversation with 71%, compared to women at 29%.

When we looked at which industries were talking the most about social media it came as no surprise to find the technology, communications and marketing fields in the top three. The tech industry and communications field talked the most both holding 12.6% of the conversation, while the marketing industry followed with 9.5%.

Lastly, we thought it would be fun to share our buzz graph, which shows the words most commonly associated with our search term. You can draw your own conclusions from looking at the graph, but it’s interesting to note that both Facebook and Twitter appear right in the center meaning that they were talked about the most. It will be interesting to see if these two networks will be the focus of conversation next year as well or if something else will take their place.

It’s been an interesting year for social media and Sysomos was proud to be part of it. We’re excited to see what is going to happen in the space in 2011 and hope to play an even larger role than we did this year.

What do you think is going to happen in social media in 2011? Leave a comment and let us know.

Happy New Year!!