Welcome to another social media statistics blog post.
It’s no secret that ‘social media’ is growing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We won’t bore you too much with that.
There are a million and one places where you can find social media stats, but what use are statistics alone? It’s not until they’re put in to some perspective that they can truly be appreciated.
Leading digital blog, Econsultancy has been documenting social media facts and figures year-on-year and has recently published a post highlighting social media growth over the past year (or so).
The following statistics go some way to demonstrate the sheer scale of growth of some of the better-known social media channels.
In January 2010 Twitter had 75 million user accounts, but only 15 million used the site regularly. This resulted in 27 million Tweets per day.
Now, there are more than 175 million registered Twitter users. How many of these are regular users is unclear, but the number of Tweets per day has rocketed to 95 million – an increase of 250 percent.
LinkedIn has grown by an impressive 100 percent from last year, it now has over 100 million users across the globe. Interestingly, 56% of these users are from outside of the US.
The ever-growing behemoth that is Facebook has shown some impressive growth over the last year.
Back in January 2010, the site had 350 million active users across the globe, it now has in excess of 640 million – half of which login daily. Based on this figure, Facebook has seen a 40 percent increase in daily usage over the past 12 months.
Users accessing Facebook via their mobile device has grown by over 200 percent. In early 2010 the figure was around 65 million, it now stands upwards of 200 million. This figure evidently reflects the rise in mobile and tablet usage around the globe. Interestingly, those who access Facebook via their mobile device are proven to be twice as active as those who don’t.
People are sharing more content on Facebook now too. On average, there are more than 7 billion pieces of content shared on the site weekly. This figure has risen from last year, when it was 3.5 billion.
As Facebook continues to expand on its services, expect more growth for the next 12 months.
Flickr
At the start of 2010, Flickr was hosting around 4 billion images.
Since then it has grown by around 25 percent. By December 2010, the site was hosting more than 5 billion images. This equates to it’s members uploading more than 3,000 images per minute.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the most visited and trusted websites in the world. At the turn of 2010 the site played host to over 14 million articles from over 85,000 different contributors.
Now, the site has grown to over 17 million articles from 91,000 contributors. That’s a lot of content!
Going back to the topic of showing numbers in perspective, the figures above demonstrate just that – a truly staggering rate of growth across the board.
What will the next 12 months hold? Will Facebook continue to grow at this rate? Will Google finally crack social media? Will Twitter run out of juice?
