Nielsen has just released their Q3 2011 Social Media Report, and there are some incredibly interesting statistics included in the findings.

On the whole social media (blogs included) is a part of 80% of internet users’ lives. And people aren’t just members of social networking sites, but they are interacting with them…constantly. Apparently, 23% of an American’s time spent on the internet is spent on social media. That’s almost a quarter of the time – more than double the next category of time-occupiers, which is online gaming (9.8%).

The social media study also looked at the most active social networker and found that to be a woman. This average social media user is between the ages of 18 and 34. She lives in New England, and is likely of Asian or Pacific Island descent. She has most likely obtained a bachelor’s degree and probably makes under $50,000 a year.

The most mind-blowing stat from the study concerns the amount of time people actually spend on these social sites.  Nielsen looked at minutes spent, collectively, by Americans in one month.  According to the statistics, we spend 53,457,258 minutes, as a population, on Facebook.    That’s almost 102 years.  We don’t even spend a fraction of the amount of time on other sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.

Here are some other finds from the study –

• 37% of social media users access the platforms via mobile device
• As far the most valued services on their mobile devices, people picked social media access as number two, behind GPS
• Social networking apps are the third most popular apps, behind games and weather
• Over twice as many people 55 and older used the mobile device to access social media as did last year
• When you post a video to Facebook, women are more likely to watch but men are more likely to watch longer
• Social networkers are 47% more likely than other internet users to spend a lot of money on online shopping
• Australians spend the most time on social networks and blogs