At SES NY, there was a surprising amount of people who I spoke to who were not embracing social media as much as they could, which I feel is a huge mistake. Rand Fishkin presented some very compelling reasons to pursue social media. From his examples, articles that had good content and subsequently were made popular on a variety of social sites got a burst of traffic, and as articles hit the front page on a regular basis, he saw an increase in rankings for particular search terms. Some numbers that were thrown out: Digg is a site with 2,000,000 million daily visitors. A Digg, once it hits the main page, can bring anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000+ visitors and over 1,000 links after three weeks.

It is no surprise, then, that an earlier survey by JupiterResearch reported that 48% of Internet Marketers intend to take the plunge into social media this year. More important is a very recent study performed by iProspect that tried to understand the behavior of social network users. Jordan has a great summary of the findings, all of which are important. Among these findings are that:

• 33% of Internet users have made purchases based on social networks
• 25% of Internet users visit the popular social networking sites at least once a month

What social networks were reviewed? MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, iVillage, Yahoo! Answers, TripAdvisor, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Craigslist, and Amazon. All of these sites have user generated content and community elements, though one might wonder if some of these are truly the same kind of “social networks” that we are familiar with.

Another recent survey that I covered on the use of web 2.0 sites generated different results (which is likely due to demographics) and found that a whopping 43% of employees at large companies (>1000 employees) engage in social networks. That’s a huge number! This number is likely to grow — not diminish — as more and more people become more comfortable with online social interaction.

We are in the second quarter of 2007. I’d imagine only a small fraction of those 48% companies surveyed by JupiterResearch have started seriously using social media. It’s not too late to get involved, and you should, sooner rather than later. Leveraged properly (read our past coverage on being a power Digg user, being a power StumbleUpon user, and being a power Reddit user), social media can do wonderful things for your website, your business, your product, and your message.

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