What Is The Speed Of Social Media?

I recently had the pleasure of  travelling on the Eurostar train between London and Paris via the tunnel under the English channel at 300 kilometres an hour which is a great way to travel and sure beats travelling by Donkey.

I certainly enjoyed the experience as I was mesmerized  for over an hour in the cafeteria carriage as  we weaved and tilted around gentle curves and inclinations towards the French capital at what seemed a frenetic pace.. my friends back in their seats wondered what had become of me and whether I had sucumbed to the wiles of a French maiden.. but sadly no, it was the intoxication of speed not pheromones that had enraptured me.

Train travel in the last century has moved from steam to Maglev (magnetically levitated),  with the worlds fastest train being recorded at 581 kmh in Japan recently. (Check out this video it makes my train look like it was out for a morning stroll).

The speed of social media in the last 12 months is astounding with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter still growing at astonishing rates and new uses, applications and channels emerging such as Foursquare, Google Buzz and real time search in Google being made available.

The hardware platforms continue to evolve to make it simpler and more intuitive to view information anytime, anywhere using devices such as the iPad from Apple and faster smart phones on wireless broadband. The speed of change is going to both destroy, invigorate and create industries before our eyes that we have never imagined. The average age of females that are casual gaming with games like Farmville on Facebook  is 48, with 46% of all the casual gamers in the US being over  50.

So what speeds are the the champions of social media travelling at?

• Facebook is travelling at over 400 million users with over 100 million added in 9 months
• MySpace has over 57 million unique members in the US alone
• Twitter is growing at over 1000% in the last 12 months with a similiar growth in the previous year
• Twitter has over 75 Million users making over 50 million tweets a day
• Linkedin is now at over 60 million users
• YouTube is now serving over 32.4 billion videos a month to Gen Y and any other generation that loves a good video in the USA alone
• The number of blogs is estimated at over 200 million

The speed of change and growth in the social media and it’s transformation of the web is producing a revolution in marketing, shopping, socializing, publishing, video gaming and music (just to mention a few), that will change the world as we know it. The opportunity and ability to leverage your brands message and content is amplified by the speed and size of the global social media audience. The simplicity and low friction of the social media channels enables your images, videos and media to spread faster than you have ever imagined.

Are you up to speed, and what opportunities and threats do you see emerging ?