Understanding the latest blogging and social media statistics is essential to being a successful blogger—you have to know how people spend their time online and how they share information to optimize your site for sharing and discovery. To help you keep up-to-date on the latest and greatest of the web, here are 20 amazing social media and blogging stats:

1. Google+ pages appear in search results for 30% of brand term searches for brands with G+ pages, up from 5% in February 2012 (Source: BrightEdge) Click to tweet.

2. Tweets containing less than 100 characters receive 17% higher engagement than longer Tweets (Source: Buddy Media) Click to tweet. 

3. The average CTR for Facebook mobile ads is 1.32% compared with 0.086% for non-mobile ads (Source: AdParlor) Click to tweet.

4. 36.7% of U.S. mobile subscribers have accessed social networks or blogs with their devices (Source: comScore) Click to tweet.

5. People are most likely to engage with branded content on social media that contains pictures (44%), status updates (40%) and videos (37%) (Source: Performics) Click to tweet.

6. 57% of Pinterest users interact with food-related content, the #1 category of content (Source: Citigroup Global Markets) Click to tweet.

7. Facebook shares have the greatest influence on Google search rankings in the US, followed by the number of backlinks (Source: Searchmetrics) Click to tweet.

8. 17% of US cell phone owners do most of their online browsing on their phone (Source: Pew Research Center) Click to tweet.

9. 61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog (Source: BlogHer) Click to tweet.

10. 81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs (Source: BlogHer) Click to tweet.

11. Blogger is the leading blog site in the U.S., with 46MM unique monthly users (Source: Nielsen) Click to tweet.

12. 23% of total Internet usage time is devoted to social networks or blogs (Source: Dream Systems Media) Click to tweet.

13. For the first time, more than half (53%) of Americans 65 and older use the internet or email (Source: Pew Research Center) Click to tweet.

14. 50% of consumers worldwide trust email messages from companies they have signed up to receive (Source: Nielsen) Click to tweet.

15. 24% of the web’s top 10,000 sites have some official Facebook integration, vs 13% for Google+, 10% for Twitter, and 0.6% for LinkedIn (Source: Pingdom) Click to tweet.

16. More than 1B people will use mobile devices as their primary internet access point in 2012 (Source: Google) Click to tweet.

17. When visiting a new website, it takes users less than 0.2 seconds to form an impression (Source: Missouri University of Science and Technology) Click to tweet.

18. Pinterest buyers spend more money, more often, and on more items than any of the other top 5 social media sites (Source: comScore) Click to tweet.

19. 40% of the Interbrand Top 100 Brands are on Instagram, vs 51% on Pinterest, 64% on Google+, 94% on Twitter, and 98% on Facebook (Source: Simply Measured) Click to tweet.

20. Pinterest pins which include prices receive 36% more likes than those which do not (Source: Shopify) Click to tweet.

Track your own social media and blogging statistics with Shareaholic Analytics.