Social media is not only important, it is critical to the lifeblood of any marketing efforts for branding or sales. You already know that. What you may not know is just how important social media and mobile social media presence is and how much impact a correctly implemented social media campaign can have for getting you known and getting your product exposed to the marketplace. Take a look at some of the facts below and you may be surprised at the numbers. These facts are aggregated from social media sources around the web so you understand that we are not just picking numbers out of a hat. This data is real and it is the shape of new marketing around the globe. Get onboard or get lost in the crowd.

Twitter says it’s currently seeing about 50 million tweets per day, which breaks down to about 600 per second.

Just two days after Buzz launched, Google reported that the service had already received nine million posts and comments, and an additional 200 posts per minute via mobile phones.

Facebook has a page that says its users post more than 60 million status updates per day. Let’s do the math and try to make the most even comparison we can out of all this.

• Facebook status updates: 700 per second
• Twitter tweets: 600 per second
• Buzz posts: 55 per second

And compared to searches.

• Google: 34,000 searches per second
• Yahoo: 3,200 searches per second
• Bing: 927 searches per second

Some disclaimers are obviously in order here:

• On Twitter, every post counts as a “tweet” no matter if it’s an original tweet, a comment from another user, a link being shared, a retweet, etc. All of those are rolled into one number.
• Facebook’s number is only status updates. It doesn’t include comments from other users on someone’s status update, nor does it includes “likes” of a status update — both of which are popular activities on Facebook. More importantly, it also doesn’t include photos, links, notes, and all the other types of user activity that happen on Facebook.
• Buzz was only two days old when Google published its numbers.

The difference in how all three social networking sites operate underscores the challenge in trying to compare activity levels. One suspects that, if Facebook provided specific numbers about comments, likes, photos, links, and so forth — i.e., more than just status updates — it would be significantly ahead of Twitter, despite the impressive growth in the numbers of tweets.

What we search for on search engines can also be considered a form of updating (see Take  That, Twitter: Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search. So how does that measure up? I took comScore’s recent worldwide estimates for Google, Yahoo and Bing and did some division to come up with the figures below:

• Google: 34,000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month, figures rounded)
• Yahoo: 3,200 searches per second (194,000 per minute; 12 million per hour; 280 million per day; 8.4 billion per month, figures rounded)
• Bing: 927 searches per second (56,000 per minute; 3 million per hour; 80 million per day; 2.4 billion per month, figures rounded)

NOTE: The Yahoo figure is actually 9 billion per day; Bing 4 billion. I’ll correct these shortly.

FYI, I did ask Google if they provided some official figures, bu they’d only say that each day there are more than 1 billion searches that happen on Google. That means at least 10,000 searches per second officially, at minimum.