I know what you’re thinking. Another social media blog post.
Bear with me here. There’s a reason that they are so prolific in the blogosphere, and that’s because social media is one of the most vital aspects of mass communication today. It’s one of the most prolific and abundant means of getting across what we want to say to anyone, anywhere.
This is not a flash-in-the-pan process. It’s not something that suddenly sprung up. It’s been an ongoing trend and it doesn’t show any signs of halting in the next few years. Half of all adults in the UK, USA, Russia and Spain use social networking sites. This is almost a 20% climb on last year. One-quarter of the world’s online population logs onto Facebook every day.
Growth in the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region have all shown a marked increase in social media usage, ranging from 24% to 31.8% of total adults in those areas. On a global level, visitors will spend approximately 5 hours on average using social sites per month.
A growing global audience
Remember, this is simply the average. Many countries will spend far more time using these platforms every month. Argentina, for example, spends 9.8 hours. Russia with 9.6 hours. eMarketer have stated that Central and Eastern Europe is fully expected to overtake North America in terms of social audience by 2014.
Furthermore, in less than three years, it’s estimated that India’s online population will grow from 140 million to a staggering 450 million.
Further east, Indonesia is blazing the trail for social media. It is currently the third biggest market when you compare number of tweets. This is ahead of markets where Twitter is a dominant social platform, such as the UK and South America.
Not just Google out there
On a side note, we all know that Google is running the show mostly when it comes to search. With 71% of the market, it’s important to notice that it is not omnipresent. For example, China is actually kind of a big deal when it comes to the online search game. Their engine, Baidu, comprises almost 17% of the market.
Not a huge number you might think. But consider the estimates that China has an online population of 600 million. That means 1 in every 4 people using the internet is from China.
Yandex, a Russian search engine, is actually ranked fourth in the world, in front of Bing.
Or Facebook either…
When it comes to social media, we tend to assume that Facebook and Twitter is the be-all-and end-all. Whilst Facebook is certainly the favourite for the majority of countries, Twitter still has a long way to go to beat the competition.
Amazingly, two of the largest online markets in the world (China and Russia) don’t have Facebook as their most used social site. In fact, it doesn’t even rank in China’s top three platforms. For Russia, it comes in third.
Social media is here. It’s getting bigger each year. It’s becoming ingrained in the online habits of many countries. There’s nowhere left to hide from it.
Do you think that social media is going to change how we communicate? To what degree has it done so already? Let us know your thoughts.