Social media remains the hot topic of the digital world and I often get asked about the various statistics involved. This in itself is fairly difficult, as this particular online sphere is constantly shifting, evolving and growing at an astronomical rate. But I’ve pulled together some interesting (and hopefully useful) data for a couple of the bigger players in the market...
Bear in mind that these are relatively recent figures – in a few months time (or even less) a lot of it is likely to be obsolete - but for now, I think they’re a great way of demonstrating the impact that social media is having in the digital landscape.
YouTube
- If YouTube were a country, it would be the third most-populated place in the world.
- 20 hours-worth of video is uploaded to the site every single minute.
- comScore recently announced that the site had surpassed 100m viewers in the USA alone. They also reported that this US audience consumed over 6bn videos at the beginning of this year.
- According to Youtube themselves, over half of users visit the site at least once a week
According to Facebook’s internal statistics:
- The site has more than 250m active users globally
- More than 120m users log on to Facebook at least once each day and more than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day. Combined, more than 5bn minutes are spent on the site on a daily basis.
- The average user has around 120 friends on the site.
- Every single month, more than a billion photos are uploaded to the site.
- More than 50 translations are available on the site, with more than 40 in development.
- Mobile is a big issue, with more than 30m active users accessing the site through mobile devices. It's well documented that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.
MySpace
- Although now overtaken by Facebook, MySpace is the second largest social network, experiencing in excess of 60m unique users each month.
- MySpace apparently reaches 30% of UK adults aged 15-24 - it's been suggested that its as common to have a MySpace account in the UK as it is to own a dog.
- According to Knol, MySpace has more than 115m active monthly users globally with, on average, 300,000 new people signing up to the site every day.
Twitter
- Over the past twelve months, Twitter’s year-on-year growth rate has broken the 1000% barrier.
- The company holds exact numbers close to their chest, but it's estimated that Twitter currently has between 6 - 10m global users and this is growing rapidly.
- According to a recent report on Twitter usage by Sysomos, 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity and that 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
- The same report found that over 50% of all updates are published using mobile and Web-based tools, other than Twitter.com’s own website.
- It also found that Tuesday is the most active day for Tweeting, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
- Hitwise recently reported that one out of every 350 website visits in the UK is via Twitter, but barely 5% of users currently go to an online retail service through the medium.
- Not really a stat, but still quite a cool piece of info: Twitter is now officially a term in the English Dictionary.
11:30AM on 31st July 2009
There's a report on Twitter and youth take up in the UK here: http://dubitinsight.blogspot.com
1:03PM on 31st July 2009
Useful insights and a good post. But I worry a little that it has too western a slant.
This comment: "Although now overtaken by Facebook, MySpace is the second largest social network, experiencing in excess of 60m unique users each month."
Presumably (I assume because it's not clear) that's true for the US, even the UK but what is the sitiuation if you take Asia into consideration?
Are there social networks in asia bigger than or comparable to Facebook/MySpace. That would be a post well worthy reading.
Senior Research Analyst at Econsultancy
1:46PM on 31st July 2009
@Sam - Thanks for this
@Dan - It's a fair point that you make, however, it's not a 'Western slant'... I think it's fair to say that because English is so commonly spoken across the world, this is why English-speaking sites are so commonly the pack leaders - and often, this is not just confined to social media. The fact that sites like Facebook offer multi-lingual options also strengthens their postion.
For example, the top Asian social networks are generally cited to be Mixi (Japan), QQ (China) and Cyworld (Korea), but if you look at the overall traffic volumes for the first two - Mixi and QQ - they fall way behind the likes of Facebook/MySpace.
This seems to me to suddenly become a study of culture, instead of a study of data - and an area that would be difficult to comment on here, as the aim of this post was to highlight the extraordinary numbers that can currently be found in the social media sites that people are focusing on the most at this particular point in time.
I agree though, that it would be interesting to get hold of some specific figures to see exactly what amounts of traffic arrive at these particular sites from specific countries, not just ones in the Asian region.
As an aside, although Twitter is seeing a large take-up in Asia, I think the most widely-used microblogging service is actually Plurk, although if anyone knows, please say!
3:48PM on 31st July 2009
We have just carried out some research into Social Media within SME's that has revealed some interesting data. You can download a free copy of our report here http://www.quba.co.uk/Social-Media.aspx#
8:48AM on 1st August 2009
Hi!
First of all, thank you very much for this very interesting information. To open a small debate, i am a strong believer in Social Media and Networks and the rol in society and consumers. However, when i see this numbers i feel they are somehow manipulated and somehow tricky.
In the last report about twitter i show, nearly 90% of the registered users didn't had their basic profile completed and where not real active user of the game.
I miss some more serious studies and numbers about real users in Social Media, that we can use to convince companies, directors or other people to invests or at least to believe.
Sometimes this kind of Headlines Numbers can reduce credibility instead of reflecting the real power of Social Media.
What do you think?
9:16AM on 1st August 2009
Great article. Statistics like this are always valuable and good to know (also, they remind us of what a HUGE world-changing movement we're a part of!)
Thanks,
Russell
6:34PM on 1st August 2009
I'd also be interested to see where something like Hulu fits into this mix. As we move forward with content providers moving more social, will their numbers begin to compete?
7:59AM on 2nd August 2009
you showing really informative post here.
12:23PM on 2nd August 2009
Nice stats :) so many online users with time to spare :)
9:17AM on 3rd August 2009
Good work! Thanks for that!
10:03AM on 3rd August 2009
Informative statistics to create business cases for senior management to invest resources into social media strategy
10:51PM on 3rd August 2009
Hi, Jake. I'm doing a brief article for my association's publication on social media use and would like to use some of your stats in a sidebar. Please let me know if that's OK to do, with attribution to you and Econsultancy.
7:13PM on 5th August 2009
Wow, those are definitely some interesting stats. It's certainly true social media has an enormous impact these days, and so, harnessed correctly, marketing with those can be extremely effective. The giants obviously have a significant impact, but even smaller channels -- for example, other video sites besides YouTube like Vimeo and AdWido -- can have a great impact. Every bit counts, after all, and those extra bits are free in this online world.
5:12PM on 7th August 2009
Awesome info, you can RT this hundred times.
Keep up the good work.
8:29PM on 7th August 2009
if people are spending so much time reading other people's daily status - what is happening to our work productivity -- if we extrapolate this -- people are working less and less and following each other's minor status changes more and more. Microsoft office increased US productivity -- are fb and twitter destroying it?
Senior Research Analyst at Econsultancy
7:59PM on 8th August 2009
@Carlos – I’m personally of the belief that *generally* the headline figures from established social media forms can be relied upon quite well. For example, social networks have proved to act as extremely successful advertising platforms over the years as well as also being able to demonstrate hard figures of usage through analytics. I don’t think that any data which exists is manipulated to directly mislead people, but I do agree with your comment that figures can be tricky...
If you look at other social media forms, evidence exists for good case studies. For example, front-line companies consistently researching their fields of speciality and driving results for clients (eg. User-reviews to increase conversion rates) through to solid information from the likes of comScore or Technorati which can provide useful figures that demonstrate the growth and metrics within social media.
However, as you mention Twitter specifically, the facts become a bit more blurred, not only because they keep information closely guarded, but also because it’s a relatively new platform which has experience enormous interest and growth within the past few months, meaning that it could be argued that solid data is very thin on the ground, due to its short life-span and meteoric rise.
You mentioned that 90% of Twitter users haven’t completed their basic profile. I’d be interested to see where that piece of information came from? I’d say that it’s certainly true that the enormous figures surrounding Twitter can be difficult to interpret. The Sysomos report I mentioned in this article helps to break this down however. Some interesting things they found included that:
From this kind of infomation, approximations of usage can be formed based around the total number of users engaging with the service on a regular basis.
To summarise though, I feel that organisations shouldn’t particularly be questioning the power or reach of social media – instead they should be questioning whether using it is right for them as part of the marketing mix and, if so, how they can harness it efficiently through a strategy that will work to achieve their objectives. Hope this helps.
@Alison – Extremely good point and something I’m looking into. Watch this space ;-)
@Glenda – No problem, just please be sure to reference Econsultancy and/or the original source of the data. If you have any questions/problems, give me a shout.
@Everyone else – Thanks for the comments and opinions.
Cheers.
J
6:20PM on 24th August 2009
Jake Hird thank you very much for the statistical report that you present to us.
I translated into Spanish, big part of this article.
----------------------
Jake Hird muchas gracias por el informe estadístico que nos presentas.
Traduje al español, gran parte de este articulo pueden verlo en:
http://www.gustavocoronel.com.ar/datos-estadisticos-de-la-redes-sociales/
MD at WSI- Wakefield
1:45PM on 1st September 2009
hey, thanks for these stats. Appeciate that they may already be out-of-date. But its better than a kick up the backside!
Cheers
Bob
7:01AM on 9th October 2009
I have an old English dictionary from 1967 and the word "twitter" is in that. Apparently been around since the middle ages and means to talk rapidly in an idle of trivial way
12:42AM on 11th November 2009
These are some mind-bending stats. Google is becoming more and more irrelevant in terms of traffic. Well, that may be an overstatement of epic proportions, but it is becoming easier to drive traffic in many other ways via social media.
I read somewhere that Facebook is becoming one of the biggest drivers of website traffic in the U.S. I have no exact statistic, but this is pretty interesting.
12:42AM on 28th December 2009
I find the statistics unremarkable compared to what is coming, which no one seems able to predict. Of course I've never been one to fall for "mind-blowing" titles when attached to the word "statistics". ;-) Did you know that 80% of statistics are made up, and the other 20% haven't been invented yet? :-p
12:18PM on 27th January 2010
It's true that lists of social media statistics (particularly Twitter) are everywhere, including on our website. It's difficult to discern fact from fiction with some statistics, and sometimes some of these numbers can be a bit hard to believe.
With Twitter in particular there are a lot of users and a lot of tweets, but I haven't yet found a way to really understand the signal to noise ratio, or more precisely, what percentage of Twitter tweets are actually useful. I guess that's subjective.
We built a realtime analysis tool that starts out with the total number of tweets since Twitter began and then calculates some interesting printing related facts, you can try it out here http://www.inkfactory.com/print-twitter
At the time of writing there have been eight billion two hundred seventy-six million seven hundred fifty thousand four hundred twenty-one tweets since Twitter started!
Don't feel bad about not having read them all.
7:20AM on 18th August 2010
"more than 5bn minutes are spent on the site on a daily basis." ---this is an amazing fact about Facebook. It is just fun to read those facts about Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. We can be sure that in the next couple of months, the numbers you have there will kept on growing.