Social media - tips, tricks, and shortcuts are on the brain this week at APPRO and CERRON. Why? Well, we made the commitment this past year to dig in more deeply to the utilization of social media to begin or continue discussions with our friends and clients, in addition to finding out what is important to each of their businesses. And, why not? It is growing in use due to an increase in mobile device usage and an adoption of use by the older segment of our population, according to a recent article by Jeff Bullas for Small Business on Yahoo!, titled, "21 Awesome Social Media Facts, Figures and Statistics for 2013."

According to Bullas, here are some very interesting facts about the adoption and growth of social media:

• Mobile – with the number of people accessing the Internet via a mobile phone increasing by 60.3% to 818.4 million in the last 2 years.
• Older users adoption – On Twitter the 55-64 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic at 79% since 2012. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook’s and Google+’s networks are the 45 to 54 year age bracket at 46% and 56% respectively.

In addition, we wanted to share some basic stats for each of the social media outlets we found fascinating (again thanks to Jeff Bullas (who can be followed on @jeffbullas on Twitter) for sharing these stats):

• Facebook: Monthly active users have passed 1.1 billion for the first time
• Twitter: 288 million monthly active users
• YouTube: 1 billion unique monthly visitors
• Google+: 359 million monthly active users according to a Global Web Index study
• LinkedIn: Over 200 million users

We were fascinated by these stats and consider ourselves relative novices in the use social media. So, maybe like you, if you have jumped on and are in the midst of "liking", "tweeting", and "sharing" but, find it all takes a whole lot of time in your day (you didn't really have to spare), we would like to share some time saving shortcuts with you. We came across this great social media shortcut infographic article on Quintly, by Aljoscha Fermor we wanted to share with our readers.

If you have not already connected with us on our social media sites - go ahead and click on the links at the top of our web page, or right here: We look forward to connecting with you to bring you property solutions as we continue to work for you...with you!