There is no doubt that social media has had a largescale impact on our world. Communities have been made and news has been shared. This comes as no surprise, but Kit Smith’s article, “Marketing: 105 Amazing Social Media Statistics and Facts,” contains 105 interesting statistics and facts you may not know.
There are roughly 7.6 billion people in the world. Smith writes that of those 7.6 billion people, 3.03 billion people use social media. This means almost half of all the population is on some form of social media. Smith goes on to state internet-users have an average of 7.6 social media accounts. In my opinion, this seems like a steep number. Social media users rose by 121 million between quarter 1 and quarter 2 of 2017. Luckily for us, Smith did the math for us and writes that this number works out to be a new user joins social media every 15 seconds. Putting the number in these terms is understandable and surprising.
While this is an interesting fact, Smith also focuses on the marketing necessity of social media. The article explains 91% of retail brands use two or more social media platforms. From the information we have learned in class and through readings, this is an important factor for company success in our online-focused world. Even small and medium businesses understand the importance of using social media. Smith reports 81% of all small and medium businesses report using social media. Advertising on social media was totaled at $40 billion for companies.
In terms of conversations and messages, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp handle 60 billion messages a day. This is a good point of reference when discussing our use of social media. While many think of social media being sites like Facebook and Instagram, we forget about apps like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp and our reliance on them.
Smith’s article states Facebook as having the most users. Facebook has 2.072 billion users. While this is a large number, I am unsurprised at finding out that Facebook is the largest used social media platform. Facebook was one of the first successful platforms.
While we use social media every day, we rarely think about the numbers and facts that go along with it. Smith’s article sheds light on the subject and provides little-known facts about the thing we surround ourselves with.
