Noteworthy Social Media Facts to Begin 2012

January came and went, and so did unforgettable social media developments. To recap last month, we gathered the most important facts and statistics documented in January 2012.

• Twitter users welcome 2012 with 16,000 tweets-per-second, more than doubling last year’s record. (Source: MediaBistro)
• President Obama joined the 15+ million users on Instagram. (Source: YourSocialMove)
• 3% of adults say they get news and information about local businesses from social media, while 38% claim to use Internet search engines. (Source: Pew Internet)
• 49,000,000 Americans visited the Google+ platform. (Source Hitwise)
• Coldplay became the top page on Google+ with 618,356 followers. (Source: SocialStatistics)
• 82% of the world’s online population are determined to be reached by social networking sites, representing 1.2 billion users around the world. (Source: comScore)
• For the first time in its 11-year life, Wikipedia’s English-language pages went offline to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. (Source: YourSocialMove)
• 19.7% of the total Facebook user base is proven to be located in the United States. (Source: AllFacebook)
• 4,306 +1′s are counted on the most-shared picture this month on Google+. (Source: SocialStatistics)
• The first ever Super Bowl Social Media Command Center launched in preparation for Super Bowl XLVI. (Source: YourSocialMove)
• McDonald’s used two hashtags, #MeetTheFarmers and #McDStores, in their Promoted Tweets which turned into a marketing disaster. (Source: MediaBistro)

What do you think these facts foreshadow for the rest of 2012? Did we miss any other imperative events and achievements from January? Let us know!