Social Media

Participation in Social Networks in the U.S. by Income In general, income had no substantial effect on social networks among survey respondents. As can be seen by the bars in this figure, participation rates for all income levels hovered around 70%. The one exception to this rule was LinkedIn. For more information about this particular report, please visit Mercator Advisory Group here.

Payments Market Share Within Social Networks Will Lead Into Other Segments The market for digital goods, at $15 billion and growing, is undoubtedly both attractive and remunerative, but it remains “small potatoes” compared to retail payments as a whole in the trillions of dollars. Not surprisingly, the new payment competitors have begun to make forays into the much larger segments of consumer payments. This figure puts the social-network-based payments discussed above into the context of four major quadrants of consumer payments: on the left side, the overall category of Consumer to Business (C2B), both online and in the physical world, and on the right side, the corresponding split for Consumer to Consumer (C2C) payments. For more information about this report, please visit Mercator Advisory Group here.

Markets for Micropayments Within Social Networks Overall, the market for online sales of digital goods in the micropayment price range is exploding. We expect to see growth led by three parts of this market: social games virtual content, digital music downloads, and digital publishing. Since 2009, the social games have grown bigger and better, and social networks such as Facebook delivered the growing audiences that the games needed. For more information about his particular report, visit Mercator Advisory Group here.

SMART Social Media This chart captures some broad segments of social media technologies. Most often, “social media” is the very general description that refers to the entire group of 20-25 categories of relatively new, and still evolving, technology-enabled communications formats. The key attribute characterizing any social media format is the element of conversation: many users are enabled to contribute, and many users can access and respond to the contributions of others. For more information about this particular report, please visit Mercator Advisory Group here.