Buzz happens.  Social media has grown dramatically in the past five years and continues to grow at a blistering pace.  People from all over the world are vocalizing what they think, what they're doing, where they're going, the things that make them happy and sad, angry and excited, what they like and dislike.  They're talking about EVERYTHING.  

Here are a smattering of quick facts related to some of the well-known social media platforms (taken from their press pages & conferences):

• The average Facebook user has 130 friends.
• Over 25 Billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook, each month.
• There are over 200 Million active users of Facebook on their mobile phones.  Overall, there are over 500 Million users of Facebook.
• In 2010, Twitter had over 100 Million registered users, with new users signing up at a rate of 300 Thousand per day.
• Twitter receives 180 million unique visitors to its site each month and receives over 600 million searches per day.
• Twitter users are averaging 55 million tweets a day.  That's 637 tweets a second.
• YouTube receives 2 Billion views a day and is the 3rd most visited website (Alexa).
• On average, visitors to the site spend about 15 minutes each day viewing and adding content to the site.
• 24 hours of video is being uploaded to YouTube each minute.
• And there are many more social media sources available...Blogs, RSS, Wiki's, LinkedIn, Communities, Forums, Picture Galleries...the list goes on and on.

That's a lot of content.  And these people are talking about your products, your services, their interactions with your company, and what they wish you'd do for them.  Are you listening?  Are you aware of what this means for your business?  Are you conducting social media research to know where you should drive your business based on this information?  Do you have a corporate listening strategy?  Social media research and social media listening are two different things.  

• The Marketing Research Association defines social media research as "the application of marketing and opinion research methods to social media data for the purposes of conducting research (e.g., usage and attitude studies, social media research tracking studies, custom research, etc.)." 
• Social media listening is just what you'd think.  Listening to what is being said about you, your company, your products and services in the social media channels.  You can learn a lot by listening. 

But how do you gather all of this information from all of these different sources?  Whether you have a need to do social media research, listen to your customers, or if you simply don't know if they are talking about you and you need a social media strategy, you've come to the right place.  Whatever your social media content need, we have your solution and it doesn't require a long-term contract, or any contract, or time and technical expertise to do it yourself.  Discovery Research Group will guide you to informed decisions by providing you with the social media feedback you need to answer your business questions.