My name is Angela, and I’m an addict. My addiction has taken over my life. I find myself doing it when I wake up in the morning, I do it when I’m on conference calls with clients, I do it when I am sitting at stoplights, I even sneak off to the bathroom at dinner to do it. What is my addiction you ask – it’s called Social Media.

6 months ago I hated social media. I hoped it was a fad and would just go away. It didn’t. My clients started asking for it. I threw up the towel and decided, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”.

I am now on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook – 3 of the largest social media sites on the internet. With Facebook being my most favorite. I participate in Facebook at least half a dozen times per day – some days much, much more.

Twitter is a service that acts like a mini-blog, allowing you to “tweet”, up to 140 characters at a time about either something personal or about business. Other Twitter users “follow” you, so they can see your “tweets.  Like text messaging for the web.

Facebook was started as a college yearbook, but in the last few years became a platform for you to provide information to the world or just your 2 closest friends, or anything in between. You can upload videos, photos, content, anything you’d like. Your facebook account can be public, or private.

Linked In is the most popular ‘BUSINESS ONLY’ platform. It allows you to list your career path, recognitions, affiliations, etc. You “connect” with colleagues, clients and employers. Once connected to others, you can then see their “connections” which allows you to open up your networking possibilities by being able to get to know more people.

All 3 services by the way, are free.

So what exactly is social media? Wikipedia defines social media as… “Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction, using Internet- and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratIzation of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.”

What the heck does that really mean?

Watch this short video – that really breaks it down.

So now that we’ve seen the video – I hope it gave you a little better idea of what social media can do for you, and the possibilities it has for your business.

If you are like me, and hoping this will eventually pass, or thinking that it doesn’t apply to you, let me share a few interesting stats with you….

If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia

The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females

Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the population of Ireland, Norway, and Panama.

78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 14% trust advertisements

More than 1.5 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook… daily.

Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web

Now this is phenomenal…

Years to Reach 50 million Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)… Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months, quickly approaching the 300 million user mark… iPhone applications hit 1 billion users in 9 months.