Larger than America. China and India in its sights. It’s not too hard to imagine a world where the next Cold War has something to do with Google and Facebook locking horns.

Here’s a handy chart demonstrating a new way to measure how fast Facebook is growing:

In other words, “600 million users” is a staggeringly large number. “Larger than the total population of South America” puts that number into context.

It’s just one more good reminder of the sheer scale of possibility that social media marketing is beginning to unlock.

Think of it like the Yellow Pages — everyone’s listed. Except everyone spends time (lots and lots of time, depending on the level of your Facebook addiction) dabbling with their listing, checking in and commenting on other people’s listings, adding pictures to their listing, declaring their likes, tastes, and interests (read: marketing hints) on their listings, etc. You get the point.

And it’s a Yellow Pages that goes far, far beyond individual cities, indexing the globe at unprecedented speed.

Overwhelmed? Don’t be.

Obviously, you’re not going to reach everyone—which is fine because you don’t need to reach everyone. Because if you do social media marketing right, your business can simply reach more people — say those looking for Custom Swimming pool builders in Dallas — who are ready and likely to become customers.

In other words, it means enormous possibilities for small, valuable connections.

And that’s the core potential of stuff like social media marketing and local search — they can connect your business with the people who want to be your customers (plus those who don’t yet realize that they want to be your customers). The scale of that potential is just much, much larger in a way that simply did not exist just a few short years ago.

And while no one has quite figured out how to fully harness such possibility, it sure is fun to try. We’ve mentioned a few fun and creative (and effective) social media marketing campaigns — like the one where Baskin-Robbins gave away coupons to groups of 31 ice cream lovers on Facebook, or the one where McDonalds gave out giftcards to folks who’d “check in” at one of their stores on location-based search app Foursquare.

Have fun with. Get excited about it. Just don’t ignore it. We can help—contact one of our Dallas social media marketing experts for more information.