There is a illuminating Social Media piece this morning from Jake Hird at eConsultancy.
In it, he lays out the numerical growth of Social Media over the last 12 months.
This is explosive growth.
Some highlights:
Last Year: Facebook has 350 million active users on global basis.
Now: Facebook officially hit the half-billion member mark last year. According to figures from Socialbakers, there are now some 640m Facebook users worldwide.
Last Year: 50% of active users log into Facebook each day. This means at least 175m users every 24 hours.
Now: Still citing the 50% active rate, using the official 500m figure, this means at least 250m users every 24 hours. This is more than a 40% increase in 12 months.
Last Year: 65m users access Facebook through mobile-based devices.
Now: It may well be the year of mobile… For Facebook. Users accessing the site through mobile devices now tops 200m – an enormous 200% increase in around a twelve-month period.
Last Year: There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
Now: Clearly, Facebook is still growing: More than 30bn pieces of content is shared each month, which is an average of 7bn pieces a week.
Last Year: Twitter has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis.
Now: Twitter now officially claims to have 175m registered users, although it’s unclear what percentage regularly user the service.
Last Year: LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide.
Now: Officially, Linkedin has grown 100%, now having over 100m professionals who use the platform worldwide.
Last Year: Flickr hosts more than 4bn images.
Now: Flickr continues to grow at a steady rate, having increased by some 25% in the last twelve months. At the end of 2010, it was hosting more than 5bn images.
Six other tidbits from Jake Hird:
- More than 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
- Flickr members upload more than 3,000 images every minute.
- The average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content each month.
- There are more than 2bn video views on YouTube every 24 hours.
- People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
- People on Facebook install 20m applications every day.
The Final Take: David Byrne may have put it best…
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
That is, you need to be careful analyzing numbers and “facts”. As objective as you try to be, they all come with a point of view.
Here’s mine: Some broader trends are well amplified here. The ascension of Mobile as a platform, and photos and video as preferred content forms, are undeniable.
And the scale of Facebook’s penetration and user participation is almost beyond comprehension. This growth easily dwarfs the golden years (2000-2002) of AOL for example, where 25mm monthly subscribers was seen as a bellwether mark, or MySpace’s climb to 100mm accounts in 2006.
This kind of scale has tremendous ramifications for users and businesses alike. Some strategists view Facebook as a “shadow internet” — with visitors who are “always on Facebook” simply substituting their Facebook activity for all online activity. Others opine that Facebook will inevitably plateau, and to be careful about over-optimizing your web activities just to serve Facebook.
Lastly, with the rise of Linkedin, Twitter, and Flickr (or Pandora for that matter), it’s clear that highly targeted silos can scale. Businesses with great, differentiated, user experiences can grow faster than ever before.
Again, just my point of view — based solely, of course, on the facts.
Read the full eConsultancy piece here.
