YouTube Generation
With Facebook and Twitter taking so much of the limelight in recent months you’d be forgiven for thinking these were the only platforms in Social Media. Facebook definitely the “Star of the Show” in terms of audience, it currently has 53% of all visits to Social Media sites.
In recent months this has been declining, albeit slowly.
There is a big jump to Twitter, which takes only 3.2% of the visits and as the 3rd most popular social platform. Could this be slightly skewed by the fact that many Twitter users do not visit the site itself to interact?
Sitting in between these two is a sleeping White Whale, YouTube may well be the Moby Dick that Facebook, like Jonah, is dreading. YouTube has a 20% share of the Social Media category audience and more importantly backed by Google’s 90% domination of the search engine market.
YouTube integrates quietly into blogs, sits in the wings on Facebook and receives many shares via Twitter. Yet it is a social networking platform in it’s own right, responsible for the fame and fortune of many young Justin Bieber wannabes.
The 3rd largest web site in the UK overall, in terms of visits, YouTube left Hotmail behind at the end of 2010.
Multi-platform by default, mobile is one of YouTube’s biggest future assets.
As the trend for video consumption online grows it is sure to be Google’s “Social Saviour”. In the US, viewers consumed 8.7 billion streams in April 2011, up 7% from March. Way ahead of Facebook video with a mere 147 million streams.
As businesses and consumers alike get the hang of using online video, YouTube could be what “Killed the Social Media Star”.
