Did you know that with more than three million active Twitter users, and a 300 percent year-on-year growth rate, Saudi Arabia ranks number one in the world as the fastest-growing Twitter nation? Moreover, Arabic is the fastest-growing language on Twitter, and 88 percent of the Middle East’s online population uses one or more social networking sites each day.

Indeed, social media usage throughout the Middle East is very much on the rise, with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ all popular in varying degrees through the Gulf region, and LinkedIn has a particularly strong presence in the business-focused UAE.

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As social media has rapidly integrated itself into seemingly all aspects of our personal and professional lives over the past decade or so, it’s easy to forget how much of an impact it has had, negatively, on all those things that we used to like to do – a lot – before Twitter and Facebook came along.

TV, for example. We used to watch a lot of that. And we still, really, but it’s on the decline, as is radio, alongside newspaper and magazine reading.

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In less than a decade, social media has evolved from an innovative, albeit fairly casual digital connection between friends to an all-consuming business and marketing powerhouse that can quickly overwhelm with the sheer number of options and data available to both the end user and brands of all shapes and sizes.

Did you know, for example, that in any given minute more than half a million comments are posted to Facebook, 347,000 tweets are submitted on Twitter and 3,600 photos are shared on Instagram? For businesses looking to embrace all aspects of social media this can quickly lead to an information overload… and it’s the customer who suffers the consequences.

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Would you like to become a social media marketer? You know, so you can actually use Twitter and Facebook – proactively – at work?

Sure you would. But you have to memorise a few key stats, first. For example, did you know that the U.S. is the top country on Twitter, and that 34 percent of marketers have generated leads using the micro-blogging social network?

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There are close to two and-a-half billion people online around the world – this number has grown a heady 566 percent since the year 2000 – and 70 percent of them use the internet each and every day. As you might imagine, with that kind of presence, which amounts to more than a third of the global population, quite a lot happens over the course of each 24 hours.

You want some examples? You got it. Each day, an average of 139,344 new websites go live. An incredible 144 billion emails are sent and received. 500 million people log into Facebook. Hundreds of millions of tweets* are written and exchanged, and, perhaps most amazingly, 60 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute.

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You probably already knew that social networking was popular in the United Kingdom, certainly if you live there, but until now you might not have been aware just how much time is spent using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook in the UK.

A new study from Experian has revealed that 22 percent of all time spent online by adult UK internet users last year involved social media, equating to a heady 13 minutes in a single hour.

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Did you know that almost three-quarters (71 percent) of internet users are more likely to purchase from a brand that they are following on a social networking site such as Twitter or Facebook?

Indeed, social media now accounts for almost one-quarter (22.5 percent) of all time that U.S. citizens spend online, and this weight of activity transcends down to all levels – an incredible 91 percent of searchers say that they use Facebook to find local businesses online.

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Historically (and statistically), social media has always skewed slightly favourably towards women, and recent studies suggest that almost three-quarters (71 percent) of internet female users are active on one or more social media sites, compared to slightly less than two-thirds (62 percent) of men.

Typically, women are more likely to use Twitter (which has a 62 percent female populous), Facebook (58 percent women) and, of course, Pinterest (70 percent women), whereas men dominate Google+ (64 percent men), LinkedIn (54 percent men) and YouTube (54 percent men).

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Who is the average Twitter user?

According to the latest social research, it’s an 18-29 year old minority woman who lives in an urban area. Overall, 16 percent of online Americans use Twitter, with the micro-blogging social network scoring favourably with women, Hispanics and African-American users.

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Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died yesterday, and her death, much like her life, proved to be a deeply divisive affair.

Indeed, while her passing triggered a huge reaction of 900 posts per minute in the first three hours of the news breaking, some 43 percent of these mentions were negative, with less than one in five people (19 percent) displaying any kind of positive sentiment.

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