Social Media Takes Poll Position in Internet Activity

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Globe with pointers and network signals No wonder so many recruiting professionals are calling 2013 the year of social recruiting. The social media boom totally changed how we source, recruit and even hire. Everything about recruiting has changed due to social, from screening to sourcing talent pipelines. Recruiters climbed aboard this bullet of a train and have fully embraced the power of reaching sizable audiences with less spend or effort than traditional recruiting efforts.

The big players, Twitter and Facebook, initially had a corner on the market. Facebook being the largest social network, with 1.2 billion monthly active users. As social spreads, so does the audience. They are grabbing onto new social networks and the data and reach is now having to be divided.

The scene of social networking is changing just as quickly as it came, and recruiters are scrambling to try and figure out where their resources and efforts should go. As far as social recruiting goes, recruiters have had to start thinking like marketers. The new tools, data and analytics are things that marketing agencies have been using for years.

The information that can be gathered from social media is pay dirt for just about any industry. That’s why Business Intelligence pulled together a report on what matters in digital. In this report BI takes a look at the numbers behind the top social networks, gives them an “Engagement Index” and compares them. This number incorporates things like time-spend, terms, desktop and mobile. They also researched things like status updates, photo-sharing and other social sharing functions to determine the power of these such activities as they relate to driving traffic. The following are highlights of the report from an Inc.com article :

  • Social leads the pack in Internet activity with the average American spending 37 minutes per day on social networks. This tops all other categories in Internet activity, even shopping and email.
  • Desktops and laptops are no longer the most popular devices for social media. About 60 percent of the time that Americans spend on social media is via a mobile device.
  • Facebook eats up the most of our time at 114 billion minutes per month, followed by Instagram at 8 billion and Twitter at 5.3 billion.

BI also shares the top 5 Engagement Index scores for social networks on both PCs and smartphones:

  • Facebook: 50.7
  • Instagram: 13.5
  • Twitter: 7.4
  • Snapchat: 6.6
  • WhatsApp: 4.6

The study also indicated a shift toward the importance of multi-device. It sounds like social networks gain a lot more power (or a higher Engagement Index) when their audience can engage across different mobile devices.

You can find the full report here, or check out more information from a related BI report here.

By Maren Hogan