Euro RSCG

creativecommons.org/Intersection ConsultingThe numbers are impressive: Facebook added its 300 millionth member in September, and the site accounted for 58.6 percent of all U.S. visits to social networking sites in September, an increase of 194 percent over the year before. Twitter is taking off even more dramatically: That site has 20.8 million members and received 1.8 percent of all U.S. visits in September 2009, up from 0.15 percent a year earlier—that’s a growth rate of 1,170 percent. And that doesn’t even count users who get to Twitter without using its website, which could be half of all users.

Jessica E. Vascellaro reported in The Wall Street Journal (you must be a subscriber to read the story) that “while e-mail continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used e-mail across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21 percent from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31 percent to 301.5 million people.”

But what lies behind those numbers? Are social media users satisfied with the time they spend interacting online? How do social media translate into the real world? And what might the future hold?

To answer some of those questions, Euro RSCG Worldwide worked with MicroDialogue to survey 1,228 social media users and analyze thousands of verbatims and other conversations across blogs, Twitter and forums. Among the key findings:

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