In a recent article, the Burlington Free Press  implored Vermont Realtors to embrace social media. When a mainstream Gannett newspaper tells you to do something, you know it must be widely accepted. But just how popular is social media? There was a day when calling yourself “more popular than Jesus” could get you into big trouble. There was also a day when the Fab Four could threaten our morals and corrupt the minds of young people. But now that the Vatican forgives John his brashness (they said they liked the beautiful music after all) and the Pope asks Bloggers to give the Internet a Soul, I think it’s safe to speculate that social media may very well be more popular than the Word Made Flesh.

Let’s look at the numbers… Twitter: 6.0 Million Users in 2008; 18 Million in 2009; ? in 2010 (what time is it?) Facebook: 250 Million People YouTube: 123 million veiws in a day (in 2009) LinkedIn: 65 Million users MySpace: This one is funny. A Google search for this particular query about MySpace shows Facebook’s Wikipedia page as a top result. Basically, 1.67 billion people worldwide use the Internet (according to Wikipedia) 83% of the online population uses Social Media (according to www.knowledgenetworks.com) Christians: 2.1 Billion (according to wiki.answers.com) Social Media Users: 1.4 Billion and growing every day So my post title is incorrect. Blogging is not more popular than Jesus. But the numbers of people blogging and participating in social media increase every single day. So when your internet marketing guru tells you to embrace social media, you probably should start thinking about it.