20 + mind-blowing social media statistics

My friend, Steve (@Steveology) on Twitter posted this and it did just blow me away! Some of these numbers are amazing! It’s fun to read, but think about the implications: scary or wonderful? What do you think? And,  please, tech-dinosaurs of the world, you cannot argue that social media is just a fad any longer!

This was originally posted 31 July 2009 10:00am by Jake Hird, a Senior Research Analyst for Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn or see what he’s keeping an eye on via Retaggr.

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

Facebook

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.

I’m acutely aware that this is only the tip of the data iceberg for social media. If you have any other interesting stats, please share them in the comments below!

Learn more…

For background on social media generally, it’s worth reading our (free to registered users) Social Media Trends Briefing (June 2009). Econsultancy has also published Social Media and Online PR Template Files, which you can adapt and use for your own projects. For innovation in this space, download our Innovation Report.

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