The Social Media Life Cycle.

The image below from the Social Media Center provides an insight into the process of converting content and conversations – via transactions – into recommendations. The graphic shows that the real power is found in earned media. With 92 percent of trust recommendations coming from friends and relatives. In addition to that 92 percent, another 70 percent of social media content viewers trust online reviews by other consumers according to Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Report 2012. If you do anything with social media in the world of marketing and advertising, the image below is worth taking a look at.

More Things You Need to Know About Social Media.

Whats a new year without a tasty infographic about Social Media statistics? Boring thats what. The folks over at iStrategyLabs have put together an interesting little infographic that has some surprisingly good facts. Things like

80 percent of Pins on Pinterest are repins which means 20 percent of Pinterest users are the ones actually finding cool stuff.

5 million photos are uploaded to Instagram daily.

Google adds 625 thousand Google plus users a day. Who would have guessed that?

The Big Shift to Visual Social Media

Over the last five years there has been a massive shift in the way we communicate online, especially with Social Media. And as 2012 wraps up, it’s fairly apparent that most of us are using Visual Social Media to share our message.

What began almost two decades ago as websites, shifted to dynamic websites which led to the blog explosion of the early 2000’s. blogs eventually led to social interaction through comments, community building, and linking between like minded writers. With the average blog coming in around 500 to 1000 words per post, things began to shrink. Posts got shorter, and then with the introduction of micro blogging through Facebook and Twitter, online social interaction compressed, and exploded about 5 years ago.

Now we are making a new shift, from “Tell” to “Show” as services like Instagram, Pintrest, YouTube, and Vimeo become social networks of choice. Easy of use, bandwidth, and always on access via smartphones are helping to propel this shift toward multimedia micro blogging offering a rapid, dynamic way to share rich media in entertaining formats.

So at the end of 2012, we are witnessing the inevitable shift to a point where image based social networks are taking the lead. No wonder why Facebook bought Instagram earlier this year. They see it too. Look at the infographic by SociallySorted below and you’ll understand. Social Networks like Instagram and Pinterest have grown at an outstanding rate in the last 12 months with no sign of slowing down. 2013 should be a very interesting year for social media.

The Never Ending Growing Impact of Social Media.

Most of the information in the image below isn’t really new, or ground breaking. If you don’t know the impact that social media has had on the internet/mobile world in the last 8 years you must have been living on a deserted island. None the less, since an image is worth a thousand words, feast your eyes upon this infographic and behold Americans’ increasing obsession with social media. One interesting little nugget is the increasing use of tablet based internet usage while watching TV.