On a previous post, I discussed the importance of diversifying your social media marketing channels due to the attacks on the social network Twitter.

As these attacks were taking place, marketers rushed to other channels such as Facebook and FriendFeed.  This, in turn, brought heavy stressed upon the infrastructure of these two servers making their responses to traffic requests quite sluggish, as well.

Over the past few days, we’ve witnessed some of Facebook’s own growing pains. 

If you've ever sat in my seminars, you found very quickly that I love statistics.  As rapid as the Social Media horizon changes, so is the rate at which these statistics change.

Socialnomics, this past week, released some staggering statistics on the current impact of Social Media. Erik Qualman has done a fine job of compiling the data and its presentation.  I think you'd agree with me how amazing some of these statistics are. A few of these include:

1. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
2. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
3. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia

Also, a few interesting facts concerning education:

1. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
2. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
3. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

Erik has posted the list of statistics along with their sources on his blog, just below the video.

Twitter was completely unavailable this morning for approximately 2 hours.  The microblogging platform that allows its users to post status and news updates in 140 characters or less was the victim of a DDoS attack. 

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an instance in which the perpetrator consistently floods the victim with multiple, bogus requests and, in turn, overloads the server preventing it from answering good requests.  Apparently the load balancing system also failed.

In turn, many of Twitter's users turned to Facebook for distribution and sharing information.  Facebook, as a result, became sluggish this morning, as well.

There are two lessons we can learn from this morning's events:

1. While we are quickly approaching, social media is not fully ready to be the primary news source.  While it can assist in sharing information quickly across a broad audience, there are a few "kinks" that still need to resolved.
2. Have a backup.  Many of these social media platforms are developed and operated by individuals and small startups that simply do not have the capital to prevent downtime.  Instead of relying on one social media channel, incorporate multiple networks as you develop your marketing strategy.

As of the writing of this post, Twitter's "Replies" and "Direct Messages" feeds are still down.