A recent report published by the Pew Researchers Internet and American Life project has found that now nearly 20% of Americans who are online are using a status updating service such as Twitter. This is almost a doubling over the numbers that previous research has shown as recently as April 2009.

A website with rich content is like candy for search engines. Everyone with a website is (or should be) concerned with how well their site is placed in search engine results. The web is full of information, the majority of web surfers use search engines to find new websites, and 80-90% of them will not look past the first page of results.

It can’t be denied that internet use is increasing moving towards social media. In fact, it has become the #1 activity on the internet outranking both porn (the previous #1 use of the internet) and search engine use. If you haven’t started thinking about your strategy for reaching your customers through this medium you need to start now. Even if yours is a smaller business, your customers are online using sites like Twitter and Facebook and you could be there engaging with them. In a recent survey 48% of marketing professionals said that social media would be the most influential channel and where they plan on putting the most investment in the coming year. And Twitter users are some of the most responsive of all with one study showing that they are nearly twice as likely to click on ads, visit company profiles and write reviews online.

Businesses (from all industries) continue to move more and more of their advertising dollars into Social Media sites like Facebook, according to this report from Nielsen. The growth has been partially fueled by the explosive growth in popularity of Facebook – a site most advertisers head to first according to the report. The amount of time Americans spend on social sites has almost tripled from August of last year, accounting for 17% of all time spent on the internet.