Ethan Meikle's Blog: 48 Significant Social Media Facts, Figures and Statistics Plus 7 Infographics

I came across some interesting social media facts and statistics that has me quite concerned about the dental hygiene levels on this planet.

Apparently there are 600 million more people that own a mobile phone compared to those who own a toothbrush.

Some research reveals that there are 4.8 billion mobile users but only 4.2 billion people with a toothbrush.

Does that mean that every mobile should be sold with a free toothbrush or should you need to produce your toothbrush before you are given possession of your new mobile phone to ensure that future personal close encounters are engaging and pleasant?

Another interpretation of those statistic is that toothbrushes are too expensive.

The Importance of Statistics

Statistics are used to make important decisions and social media statistics, facts and figures are often used to justify new media marketing strategies and tactics to the CEO.

The social media landscape changes rapidly and keeping up with the latest numbers is an essential part of continuing to make your marketing relevant and focused.

Here are the latest facts, figures and statistics for seven major social networks that marketers need to take notice of.

I have also embedded an infographic for each social media network.

Facebook

Facebook continues to innovate and evolve and the the last 12 months have seen the new timeline introduced to personal profiles and brand pages as well as the purchase of Instagram, the mobile photo app platform, which has never made any money and has only 13 employees for a generous price of $1 billion.

This underlines two key elements that emerging as pivotal to the continuing evolution of the social web.

Mobile
Visual engagement

These two factors will continue to wield sizable impact and disruption to social networks and business marketing.

So what other numbers are important to take notice of when it comes to Facebook?

Some more Facebook Facts and Figures

Monthly active users now total nearly 850 million
250 million photos are uploaded every day
20% of all page views on the web are on Facebook
425 million mobile users
100 billion connections
Zygna’s games revenue is currently 12% of Facebook’s total income
2.7 billion “likes” per day
57% of users are female

Source: InfographicLabs.com

Twitter

Twitter is still the enigma of the social networking fraternity with its usefulness questioned by a lot of people. Its simplicity is still its main attraction along with its immediacy in breaking news about the latest “events”.

Research shows that the main reason people retweet is due to interesting content.

As it approaches its sixth birthday its revenue is slowly climbing with projections that in 2012 its income will hit $260 million.

Some facts and figures to note about Twitter are:

There are over 465 million accounts
175 million tweets a day
1 million accounts are added to Twitter every day
Top 3 countries on Twitter are USA at 107 million, Brazil 33 million and Japan at nearly 30 million
Busiest event in Twitter’s history is now “Castle in the Sky” TV screening 25,088 tweets per second (previous record was the last minutes of the 2012 Superbowl with 10,245 tweets per second).

Source: Infographic labs

LinkedIn started in 2003 as a professional business social network and as of February 2012, has over 150 million members according to the official press release from LinkedIn.

More facts and figures:

2 new members join every second
USA leads membership at more than 57 million, Europe has more than 34 million members
60% of its members live outside the USA
In 2011 there were 4.2 billion professionally oriented searches on the LinkedIn platform
LinkedIn now has over 2,116 employees (at the beginning of 2010 it had only 500)
The fastest growing demographics are students and recent college graduates
Revenues for 2011 reached $522 million
LinkedIn is the 36th most visited website in the world

Source: Infographic Labs

YouTube

Communication and engagement is much more than talking or writing and the popularity of YouTube is evidence of that. The availability of cost effective high speed internet access is making it easy for people to express themselves via video. Brands have seized on its power to be a viral media that augments traditional advertising media such as TV. YouTube’s advantage is it is always available and searchable. (it is the worlds second largest search engine after Google.

This capability has been displayed by the success of the Old Spice marketing campaign amongst many others.

Some facts and figures:

3rd most visited website according to Alexa
2 billion views per day
It handles 10% of the internet’s traffic
Average YouTube user spends 900 seconds per day
44% of YouTube’s users are aged between 12 and 34
Over 829,000 videos are uploaded every day
Average video duration is 2 minutes 46 seconds

Source: Speakymagazine.com

Instagram

Instagram on the surface appears very simple. It is an app for your mobile phone that allows you to take a photo, apply a filter to make it look awesome and then you can share it on Twitter, Facebook or to your email straight from the phone.

The headline about this social network was its acquisition for $1 billion by Facebook. This was despite the fact that it hadn’t made a dollar of profit. Despite this sizable investment it could be a very strategic and savvy move by Facebook that confirms its crown as the top photo site in the world. It also reminds me of Google’s purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 which proved to be a great decision in hindsight.

Instagram Facts and Figures

Founded in March 2010 with the initial name of “Burbn” by Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger with the $500,000 in seed funding. It was launched in the Apple “app” store in November of 2010. In February of 2011 they raised an additional $7 million including an investor called Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame.
Instagram reached the milestone of 1 million users in December 2010 (only 9 months after being founded and only 1 month after going live in the Apple “app” store)
In August 2011 Instagram users had uploaded 150 million photos
10 million users were using the app by September 2011
Version 2.0 released including high resolution photo capability
The release of the Android app version saw 1 million downloads in 1 day!
April 2012, Instagram reaches the new milestone of 30 million users

Source: Visual.ly

It appears that simple ideas are sometimes the best.

Twitter is a minimalist 14o character social network, Instagram is a simple social sharing photo sharing app and Pintrest is about pinning images and videos that you like to an online pin board.

Maybe it is evidence of a cry for simplicity and efficiency in a time poor society.

Pinterest was established in December 2009 and launched as a closed beta in March 2010. It is barely 2 years old.

It wasn’t until the beginning of 2011 that it reached 10,000 users. Its breakthrough moment appears to be the inclusion in Time magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2011”

Some more Pinterest Facts and Figures

December of 2011 Pinterest became one of the top 10 largest social networks with 11 million visits per week
In January it was driving more referral traffic traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+
Over 10.4 million registered users
Nearly 12 million monthly unique vistors
Most of the sites users are female
97% of the site’s Facebook “likes” are by females
It is the fastest site in history to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark

Source: Sandbox

Google+

It is expected that Google’s new social network Google+ will hit 400 million users by the end of 2012. It needs to be kept in mind that Google+ is more about being “core” to Google’s social web strategy as it aims to embed social signals into its whole web and search strategy as it aims to continue to be relevant in an increasingly social and mobile web.

Google makes it mandatory to join Google+ when you register for a Gmail account which really amounts to it being a forced membership. This non organic strategy means that its engagement levels are extremely low at 3 minutes per month compared to Facebook at 405 minutes, in fact they are less than MySpace.

It must be also kept in mind that Google+ is the glue that connects Google’s other social and web properties such as YouTube, Android and of course search.

Some Google+ Facts and Figures

It was launched on June 28, 2011
Google+ reached 10 million users by July 14, 2011
67% of Google+ users are male
Google “+1” button is served more than 5 billion times daily
It is gaining 625,000 users per day
In less than one day the Google+ iPhone app became the most popular free application in the Apple App store