You may have heard recently that the Nielsen Corporation, the same folks who publish Television ratings, would soon be providing social media reports for Facebook.  Well Nielsen wants to take the whole social media pie by releasing a report on Monday that looks at the big picture.  Marketers hold on to your pants, this is likely to include analytics, insight for audience measurement, and so much more.

Nielsen’s Social Media Report | A Sneak Peek

We’re not sure how NYTime’s MediaDecoder blog already had a chance to look at Nielson’s highly anticipated social media report, but we’re not complaining and we’d like to share that with you.  As social media is becoming a huge factor in consumer’s lives, you’d be a fool not to pay attention to these revealing statistics and facts found in “State of the Media: The Social Media Report.”

“Social media account for 22.5 percent of the time that Americans spend online, according to the report, compared with 9.8 percent for online games and 7.6 percent for e-mail.

That makes social media the No. 1 specific category and the No. 2 category over all, behind “other” ways Americans spend time online, among them perusing adult content, visiting retail Web sites and reading about subjects like sports and health.

“Social media is becoming increasingly mainstream,” said Radha Subramanyam, senior vice president for media and advertising insights and analytics at Nielsen in New York.

As a result, “there’s a need for companies to engage even more strategically in the space” than they already do, she added.

The social media brand that Americans spend the most time with, the report finds, is Facebook, by an enormous margin. During May, when the report was compiled, Americans spent 53.5 billion minutes on facebook.com from computers at home and work. (That was up 6 percent from 50.6 billion minutes in May 2010.)

“We’ve been seeing that for a while,” Ms. Subramanyam said of the dominance of Facebook in the social media realm. The reason is simple, she added: “It’s an incredibly fun way to spend time.”

Behind Facebook during May was Blogger, at 723.8 million minutes; Tumblr, at 623.5 million minutes; Twitter, at 565.2 million minutes; and LinkedIn, at 325.7 million minutes.

Facebook reaches 70 percent of active Internet users in the United States, the report says, and of the visitors to Facebook, 62 percent were female.”

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/report-details-rise-of-social-media/

It was also revolved that women watch more videos on social media sites then men, so this is something that you marketers should keep in mind when creating your YouTube Channel content.

Nielsen’s Social Media Report | What To Expect

So now that you have some very generalized statistics from Nielsen’s social media report, we wanted to share with you what you may be able to expect in Monday’s report and some things that probably won’t be included.

Nielsen is most likely going to include some demographical statistics for the major social media sites, which depending on your industry may help reveal what social media sites you should focus more attention on.  We’d also expect Nielsen to take a look at what kinds of posts are the most effective and the half-life of interactions on the major social media sites.

Its almost guaranteed that you won’t see any analytics or stats for Google+as it is still invite only, but I’m sure Nielsen will dig there nose in there as soon as they can.  I’m sure it will come soon after Google+ opens up its social media platform to businesses.