The speed and style of communication and socializing is changing so it’s natural to see new trends slowly taking over. Social networking Web sites have given small businesses the boost they needed to generate traffic to their organization as well as get the word on the latest news out to their customers.

About 67% of the global internet population are blogging, visiting social networks and starting to make these uses more mainstream than regular email. This usage of blogging via social network(ing) sites is showing no signs of slowing down.

As one of the main things that keeps small businesses alive is their ability to look ahead of current trends. So we’ve decided to give you a few important facts on the impact of social networks in our society.

-Social network and blogging audience has increasingly become more diverse. The biggest increase of visitors in 2008 to “Member Community” Web sites came from 35-49 year old age groups (+11.3 MILLION).

-Usage of mobile technology to visit a social network has increased in the US up 156% (10.6 million) these are major increases compared to last year

-Over the last year, social networking has become the 4th most popular online category according to Nielsen Online