Here’s the understatement of the year (or perhaps of the last 4 to 5 years!?): Social Media has changed everything. Its changed the way we consume and share information, its changed how we interact with our friends, how we meet friends and it has also fundamentally changed the way companies do business…forever. One would think that with the mind boggling growth of social networking sites over the last few years, that we’d see a leveling off of sorts but all signs point to continued enormous gains. I’m sure that better connected mobile devices in the hands of even more people across the planet have fueled the continued social networking craze. Here are a few stats about how Social Media continues to dominate:

• Half of all American adults are now on Social Networks. Out of American adults who use the Internet, nearly two-thirds use Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter (DigitalBuzzBlog)
• Facebook has over 750 million active users (Facebook)
• During the average 20 minute period in 2010, there were over 5.8 million wall posts and over 10 million comments posted (DigitalBuzzBlog)
• Social Networking accounts for 1 in every 6 minutes spent online (Mashable)

We’ve been into “Social” in a big way for the past few years (Sharing, first real estate Facebook app, etc.) and we recently continued to connect our content to what’s going on at Social Media sites by adding the Facebook “Like” button to several places on coldwellbanker.com. With this enhancement, we also became the first (and only) national real estate brand to add the Google “+1” button across our site as well. The new Social Network boasted well over 25 million active users within less than a month of being in private-beta. So with Google+ opening up to everyone yesterday, we’re sure that consumers will increasingly look to share stuff they find interesting there too.

We’re pretty aware that a great deal of “social-sharing” occurs on the mobile device so we’ve also got Social integrated across all our platforms from our On Location site on over to our iPad and iPhone applications as well. So hop on over to coldwellbanker.com and hit that “Like” or “+1” button on the homepage or on the properties, agents, offices or type of “search” (Lifestyle and BlueScape) that you find interesting.

We’ve got a few other new cool Social Media related enhancements coming soon so be sure to stay on the lookout!