Three Ways Social Networking Leads To Better Business

By Scott Hebner, Social Solutions Vice President, IBM

Are you networking? Have you tweeted something or updated your LinkedIn status this week? Liked or shared something on Facebook or Instagram this week?

More importantly, are you using social networking to learn, gain knowledge, engage with experts on what interests you? Are you sharing your knowledge?

If so, you are not alone. More than seven in 10 employed people are now active social networkers as Social Networking has become the Number One use of the internet. There are more than two billion social connections generating more than three billion expressions per day. Overall, we know that 94% of people use social networking to learn, 78% to share knowledge and 49% to access needed expertise. The effect? The human condition is being radically amplified.

Think about it.

Every time someone creates a social expression, more data is generated and shared. Think about all the data that’s out there: eMarketer says there are 1.73 billion using social networks and the number will rise to 2.55 billion by 2017. In fact, 90 percent of all data was created in just the past two years. And most of this new data is a new kind of data. It’s human data, providing rich insights into the behaviors, sentiment, activities and views of large numbers of people. We are witnessing the emergence of the “human face” of data and the unprecedented creation and sharing of knowledge.

Read the full story via IBM Smarter PlanetVoice: Three Ways Social Networking Leads To Better Business – Forbes.