It is a fact of the internet that every click, every view and every sign-up is recorded somewhere.
Depending on your view, this is either very creepy or fantastically interesting.As we’re data nerds here at Brandwatch we fall firmly in the second camp.
We come across all sorts of interesting stats about social media platforms and users, so we’ve collated the best of them in this bumper facts list. And it comes as a great fact sheet to give context to your social media marketing efforts.
For the curious, these represent a series of numbers that boggle the mind, users counted in tens and hundreds of millions, and time in millions and billions of hours. For marketers, knowing the statistics behind the social networks can inform strategy and spend, allowing focused targeting of users.
Social media statistics
- For context, as of May 2019, total worldwide population is 7.7 billion
- The internet has 4.4 billion users
- There are 3.499 billion active social media users
- On average, people have 7.6 social media accounts
- The average daily time spent on social is 142 minutes a day
- 91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media channels
- 81% of all small and medium businesses use some kind of social platform
- Social media users grew by 202 million between April 2018 and April 2019.
- That works out at a new social media user every 6.4 seconds.
- Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp handle 60 billion messages a day
- When asked 81% of teenagers felt social media has a positive effect on their lives
- Another study found the effect of social media on teenagers was ‘trivial’
- A third from the Royal Society for Public Health found there were a range of negative and positive effects:
User numbers
4Chan: 22 million
Airbnb: 150 million users
Facebook: 2,375 billion users
Flickr: 90 million users
Google+: 111 million users (RIP)
Instagram: 1bn users
LinkedIn: 610 million users
MySpace: 15 million users
Periscope: 10 million users
Pinterest: 265 million users
Reddit: 542 million users
Snapchat: 190 million daily users
Twitter: 330 million users
Wechat: 1 billion users
Weibo: 600 million users
WhatsApp: 1.6 billion users
YouTube: 1.9 billion users
Social media business statistics
- Social networks earned an estimated $8.3 billion from advertisingin 2015
- $74bn was spent on social network advertising in 2018
- 38% of organizations plan to spend more than 20% of their total advertising budgets on social media channels in 2015, up from 13% a year ago
- Only 20 Fortune 500 companies actually engage with their customers on Facebook, while 83% have a presence on Twitter
- People aged 55-64 are more than twice as likely to engage with branded content than those 28 or younger
- 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles
- 78 percent of people who complain to a brand via Twitter expect a response within an hour
Social video statistics
- Facebook now sees 8 billion average daily video views from 500 million users
- Snapchat users also sees 8 billion average daily video views
- US adults spend an average of 1 hour, 16 minutes each day watching video on digital devices
- Also in the US, there were 175.4m people watching digital video content
- 78% of people watch online videos every week, 55% watch every day
- It’s estimated that video will account for 74% of all online traffic in 2017
Content statistics
- On WordPress alone, 70 million blog posts are published every month
- A 2011 study by AOL/Nielsen showed that 27 million pieces of content were shared every day, and today 3.2 billion images are shared each day
- The top 3 content marketing tactics are social media content (83%), blogs (80%), and email newsletters (77%)
- 89% of B2B marketers use content marketing strategies
Google statistics
- Google processes 100 billion searches a month
- That’s an average of 40,000 search queries every second
- 92.81% of all internet searches are carried out by Google
- Those searches are carried out by 1.17 billion unique users
- Every day, 15% of that day’s queries have never been asked before
- Google has answered 450 billion unique queries since 2003
- 60% of Google’s searches come from mobile devices
- By 2014, Google had indexed over 130,000,000,000,000 (130 trillion) web pages
- To carry out all these searches, Google’s data centre uses 0.01% of worldwide electricity, although it hopes to cut its energy use by 15% using AI
Facebook statistics
- Facebook adds 500,000 new users every day; 6 new profiles every second
- 69% of all Americans are on Facebook
- 79% of all online US adults use Facebook
- 74% of Facebook users check it every day
- The average user spends 35 minutes on Facebook a day
- The average (mean) number of friends is 155
- Half of internet users who do not use Facebook themselves live with someone who does
- Of those, 24% say that they look at posts or photos on that person’s account
- There are an estimated 270 million fake Facebook profiles
- The most popular page is Facebook’s main page with 204.7m likes. The most liked non-Facebook owned page is Christiano Ronaldo’s with 122.6m.
- There are 60 million active business pages on Facebook
- Facebook has 5 million active advertisers on the platform.
- Facebook accounts for 53.1% of social logins made by consumers to sign into the apps and websites of publishers and brands
Want more? Head to our full list of Facebook statistics.
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Twitter statistics
- 500 million people visit Twitter each month without logging in
- There is a total of 1.3 billion accounts, with 330 million monthly active users
- Of those, 44% made an account and left before ever sending a Tweet
- The average Twitter user has 707 followers
- But 391 million accounts have no followers at all
- There are 500 million Tweets sent each day. That’s 6,000 Tweets every second
- Twitter’s top 5 markets (countries) account for 50% of all Tweets
- It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to go from the first Tweet to the billionth
- 22% of Americans use Twitter
- 65.8% of US companies with 100+ employees use Twitter for marketing
- 77% of Twitter users feel more positive about a brand when their Tweet has been replied to
YouTube statistics
- 300 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute
- People now watch 1 billion hours of YouTube videos every day
- The average person wtaches 40 minutes of YouTube content a day
- More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices
- 90% of American 18-24 year olds use YouTube
- The average mobile viewing session lasts more than 40 minutes
- The user submitted video with the most views is the video for Luis Fonsi’s song ‘Despacito’ with 4.36 billion views
- YouTube sees around 1,148bn mobile video views per day
- In 2014, the most searched term was music. The second was Minecraft
- 9% of U.S small businesses use Youtube
- You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages(covering 95% of the Internet population)
We’ve got loads more Youtube statistics here.
Instagram statistics
- There are 800 million Monthly Active Users on Instagram
- Over 95 million photos are uploaded each day
- There are 4.2 billion Instagram Likes per day
- More than 40 billion photos have been shared so far
- The average Instagram user spends 15 minutes a day on the app
- 90 percent of Instagram users are younger than 35
- When Instagram introduced videos, more than 5 million were shared in 24 hours
- Pizza is the most popular Instagrammed food, behind sushi and steak
- The most liked picture on Instagram is one of an egg
- 37% of Americans now use the platform
- 24% of US teens cite Instagram as their favorite social network
Want more? We’ve got a much longer list of Instagram statistics available.
Pinterest statistics
- Pinterest has 200 million active users each month
- 28% of all online US citizens use the platform
- 67% of Pinterest users are under 40-years-old
- The best time to Pin is Saturday from 8pm-11pm
- In 2014, male audience grew 41% and their average time spent on Pinterest tripled to more than 75 minutes per visitor
LinkedIn statistics
- LinkedIn has 500 million members
- 27% of US adults use the platform
- 106 million of those access the site on a monthly basis
- More than 1 million members have published content on LinkedIn
- The average CEO has 930 LinkedIn connections
- Over 3 million companies have created LinkedIn accounts
- But only 17% of US small businesses use LinkedIn
We also have a much larger list of LinkedIn statistics.
Snapchat statistics
- Snapchat has 187m active daily users
- 60% of them are under 25
- 24% of US adults use Snapchat
- In 2016, $90m was spent on Snapchat ads
- The average user spends 25 minutes a day on Snapchat
- 73% of American 18-24 year olds use the platform
- 47% of US teens think it’s better than Facebook, while 24% think it’s better than Instagram
Head here to check out our bigger list of Snapchat statistics.
That’s your fill of social media statistics for now, with just a tiny fraction of the weird and wonderful stats and facts available out there. We’ll be updating this list as we get new data points.
If you’re looking for in-depth insights about your audience, brand or competitors, get in touch with us for a free demo, and see how Brandwatch Analytics can boost your social media strategy.
