Two surveys reveal social media becoming mainstream in the US

Two surveys out this week – one by Technorati and the other by MarketTools – show just how big, just how mainstream the blogosphere has become in the US. Here is a quote from Matt Rhodes’ posting on FreshNetworks Blog.

Two pieces of research out this week highlight the fact that social media is truly entering the mainstream. The Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 report shows that three-quarters of active Internet users globally read blogs, and 184 million people have set up a blog. If the blogosphere were a country, it would be the sixth biggest in the world, just smaller than Brazil.

Then today came research from MarketTools showing that 70% of US adults visit blogs, social networks, online communities or other social media. And 42% report that their use of these sites and tools has increased in the last six months.

Both of these reports show that social media is more and more forming a part of people’s lives. With three quarters of global Internet users, and 70% of all US adults visiting social media sites it truly now is the mainstream. 

Technorati’s survey has five days’ worth of material so I will leave people to follow it themselves. I will reproduce one pie chart and one graph. For the pie chart I will simply repeat a comment made in a posting by Adam Tinworth of One Man and His Blog (UPDATED: not ‘Dog’ as previously written – thanks Adam!) who alerted me to the Technorati survey.

Lots of people blogging about their jobs. That’s very interesting for B2B media indeed.

And parts of the survey seem very close to home!

Also read how almost 50% of Fortune 500 companies now use social media to deal with their customers, click here.

Here’s blogger Peter Kim’s collaborative list of mainly US companies using various types of social media to interact wit their customers, click here.