The enormous and sprawling online environment that is social media can be a baffling place when you’re trying to work out how to promote your brands and power your company forward. You may think you know the basic statistics of the various platforms – but you could be wrong. We’ve compiled a list of accurate facts from a variety of sources that will give you a clear picture of social media and let you get more out of this extraordinary place filled with huge audiences.
Let’s start with mobile, which is where everyone increasingly is, using their smartphones and tablet computers. Currently, 30% of Facebook access the site only using a mobile device, a figure that keeps on growing. How many monthly active users does Facebook now have? The gargantuan figure has grown even further, to 1.248 billion people around the world, and that means 581 million of them are using the service every month via their smartphones and tablets.
The message for online marketers is very clear: make sure your site is responsive to whatever device is accessing it. If you want any further indication of where it’s going, 57% of advertising budgets for Facebook are now mobile only.
Twitter seems paltry by comparison. The short-message service has 302 million monthly active users and has not managed to sign up as many people as fast as it, and its investors, would like. That’s probably because, for the average user, Twitter can be hard work – it takes a long time to grow a decent-sized following because you have to keep at it and engage people.
Still, there’s an awful lot of tweeting going on – 500 million of them zinging around the world each day. Did you know that most Twitter accounts are outside the United States, where the company is headquartered? Twitter says 77% of its accounts are outside of the US, and every single tweet is stored for posterity at the US Library of Congress – think about that when composing your next marketing tweet!
Is YouTube a social media platform? You bet it is. The hugely popular video-sharing site has over 1 billion users and more and more people are watching content on it instead of on television. In fact, the site says the amount of hours people are viewing YouTube videos each month has been rising 50% year on year – and just like all social media, mobile is playing an increasingly important role here too.
All of this interest and activity – as well as on the other social media sites, such as Instagram and Google+ – presents invaluable opportunities for companies everywhere to reach ever-higher levels of success.
