Social Media Digest: Twitter users, Sims Social and iPhone5

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top five:

1. Twitter has 100 million active users around the world, the social networking site’s chief executive has announced.
Dick Costolo, speaking at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, said that more than half of the site’s 100 million active users log in each day. He said that 40 per cent of them simply read the site, without tweeting themselves. Twitter also revealed that it now generates more than five billion tweets every month, gets 400 million unique visitors every month and said that half of its active users are mobile users.

2. The Sims Social – Electronic Arts’ latest version of its bestselling avatar-based franchise — is growing faster than Farmville. A week after its release, Sims Social had 4.6 million players logging in every day, which made it the 10th most popular game on Facebook.

3. More than 50 per cent of all UK pensioners are now active on Facebook, according to research we conducted amongst 2,400 UK adults. You can read the key findings at our previous blog post and we liked the infographic Vapour produced for us so much, we’ve decided to include it in this week’s social media digest as well. Enjoy!

4. LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network with more than 120 million members worldwide, today announced that members can now add a “Volunteer Experience and Causes” field to their LinkedIn Profile. The company also released data that reinforces volunteer work is a key piece of your professional identity. LinkedIn surveyed nearly two thousand professionals in the U.S. and found that 89 percent of these professionals have personally had experience volunteering, but only 45 percent of professionals include their volunteer experience on their resume.

5. Apple is reportedly very close to revealing the iPhone 5, and a photo posted on Flickr shows that the iPhone 5 will likely come with an 8-megapixel camera. PocketNow discovered a photo posted to the account of an Apple engineer that is marked as having been snapped using an iPhone 4. However, PocketNow took a closer look at the metadata which contained pieces of information suggesting that it was taken using an 8-megapixel camera.