20+ Mind-blowing social media statistics: One year later

It's been more than twelve months since I rounded up some of the more impressive social media stats and pieces of data. But what's happened since then? 

Clearly, social media is big, it's still getting bigger, and as a broad digital channel, is not going to disappear anytime soon. 

While the value of this type of statisitical information can be questioned, especially when considering the place of social media within a business structure, I think it serves to highlight simply how massive the channel is as a whole.

I think it also indicates the rapid growth seen amongst certain platforms, which in the physical world would generally never happen. But that in itself is a separate area of discussion. For now, here's some fresh mind-blowing stats... 

Then: Twitter has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis.

Now: Twitter now officially claims to have 175m registered users, although it's unclear what percentage regularly user the service. 

Then: LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. 

Now: Officially, Linkedin has grown 100%, now having over 100m professionals who use the platform worldwide. 

Then: Facebook has 350 million active users on global basis.

Now: Facebook officially hit the half-billion member mark last year. According to figures from Socialbakers, there are now some 640m Facebook users worldwide.

Then: 50% of active users log into Facebook each day. This means at least 175m users every 24 hours.

Now: Still citing the 50% active rate, using the official 500m figure, this means at least 250m users every 24 hours. This is more than a 40% increase in 12 months.

Then: Flickr hosts more than 4bn images.

Now: Flickr continues to grow at a steady rate, having increased by some 25% in the last twelve months. At the end of 2010, it was hosting more than 5bn images.

Then: Wikipedia has 14m articles and 85,000 contributors.

Now: Wikipedia now has more 17m articles. The site now has an army of 91,000 active contributors.

Then: 65m users access Facebook through mobile-based devices.

Now: It may well be the year of mobile... For Facebook. Users accessing the site through mobile devices now tops 200m - an enormous 200% increase in around a twelve-month period.

Then: There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.

Now: Clearly, Facebook is still growing: More than 30bn pieces of content is shared each month, which is an average of 7bn pieces a week.

Then: There are 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.

Now: Go Europe! There are now 20m+ EU Linkedin members.

Then: The average number of tweets per day was over 27m.

Now: Twitter now states that 95m tweets are written each day. This is a staggering 250% increase.

Then: The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.

Now: At the new rate of growth, its calculated that there are nearly 4m tweets per hour.

Some extra nuggets... 

• More than 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. 
• Flickr members upload more than 3,000 images every minute.
• More than one million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages (formerly known as company profiles).
• The average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content each month.
• There are more than 2bn video views on YouTube every 24 hours. 
• There were nearly 2bn people searches on Linkedin during 2010.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• People on Facebook install 20m applications every day.

[Image credit: macinate]