Social media is the number one category in terms of how we spend our time online, according to Nielson's “State of the Media: The Social Media Report." It accounts for a whopping 22.5% of Americans' online time.

This statistic is powered largely by Facebbok, which reaches 70% of the country's population. The report revealed that Americans spend over 50 billion minutes on Facebook every month, not even including time spent accessing it via mobile devices. Given that Canadians are even more addicted to social media than our southern neighbours, it's safe to say we clock in it at least 5 billion minutes monthly.

Other popular time consumers were Blogger (720 million minutes monthly), Tumblr (620 million), Twitter (565 million), and LinkedIn (325 million).

Just 17% of Canadian companies post to social media sites regularly and monitor often for corporate mention, a new study by SAS and Leger discovered.

While 30 per cent of executives interviewed said their company posts to social media sites at least several times a week, only three in five of those often monitor social media conversations. For those that don't actively monitor for mentions, half of them cited a lack of resources as the reason they aren't doing it more often.

A quarter of respondents (24 per cent) said social media strategies and tactics are driven by the CEO. Twenty-one per cent said efforts are driven by the director of communications, while 18 per cent cited the chief marketing officer as the corporate social media lead. 13% of those surveyed said their company does not engage in social media at all because it is viewed as a waste of time and effort.