59 Social Media Stats Every Marketer MUST Know

By now all brands are convinced of the benefits social media insights bring to their marketing and overall strategy. But if you don’t know just how important monitoring social media is to brand health and success, here are 59 stats to remind you.

We’ve got general stats reinforcing the necessity of social marketing overall, but there are also sections of stats for five crucial platforms. Feel free to skip to the ones that matter most for your brand:

• Facebook stats
• Twitter stats
• Instagram stats
• YouTube stats
• Pinterest stats

The lay of the land – general social media stats

1. Mobile is major. Nearly 80% of total time spent on social media happens on a mobile device. (Source: Marketing Land) Be sure your content is attention-grabbing and mobile-friendly.
2. Social customer service isn’t optional. Of Americans who use social media, 59% agree social customer service makes it easier to get answers and resolve consumer issues. (Source: Hootsuite)
3. Social users like variety – 56% of adults online use more than one of the top social platforms. (Source: Small Business Trends)
4. Blogs aren’t going anywhere. WordPress alone represents 409 million people viewing more than 23.6 billion pages monthly. (Source: WordPress)
5. Visuals are everything. Views increase by 94%, and content is 40X more likely to be shared on social media, when there are visuals in the mix. (Source: Buffer)
6. Videos will be everything. Global consumer internet video traffic will make up 80% of all internet traffic by 2019, according to projections from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index. (Source: Small Business Trends)
7. Video views are also mobile. More than half – 51% – of all video plays happen on mobile devices. (Source: Ooyala)
8. Live video is also huge – with the equivalent of 110 years of live video watched daily on Periscope. (Source: Periscope)
9. Online reviews play a huge role – 92% of consumers read them. Reading one to three reviews is enough for 40% of consumers to form an opinion. (Source: Vendasta)

This is just a snapshot of the information that matters to marketers – but it’s enough to illustrate how important it is to get things right. You don’t want to lose traction for want of an image, or a single unfavorable review.

Now read on to reveal juicy platform-specific stats your brand can leverage!

Facebook Social Media Stats

Officially the largest social app globally, Facebook boasts a record 2 billion monthly users. Of those, 79% are American. Male internet users account for 75% of those, with female users slightly more active on the platform at 83%, according to Pew Research Center.

Here are some more stats about the world’s largest social platform:

10. More than 65 million businesses have a Facebook business page. (Source: Medianama)
11. In line with our general stats above, adding an image to your Facebook posts gets you 2.3X more engagement than posts without images. (Source: Buzzsumo)
12. Posts with videos get the highest Facebook engagement. (Source: Locowise)

And speaking of videos…

13. Facebook’s users watch 8 billion videos per day. (Source: The Verge)
14. Live videos are watched 3X longer than traditional videos. (Source: Facebook)
15. 85% of Facebook videos are viewed with no audio. A great reminder to caption your videos instead of relying on audio to get your message across – which also expands your audience to include the deaf community as well. (Source: Digiday)
16. Facebook is age diverse. 82 percent of online Americans aged 18 to 29 use it, along with 79 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds, and 56 percent of online users age 65 and up. (Source: Omnicore Agency)
17. They know how to make apps American users love. The top three most popular apps in the United States are the Facebook mobile app, followed by Facebook Messenger, and Instagram –which they also own. (Source: Statista)
18. 63% of users look to Facebook (and Twitter) as a source for news. (Source: Pew Research Center)
19. There are 83 million fake profiles. (Source: CNN) This is why social listening is so important – automated likes or comments don’t really get you anywhere, you’ve got to engage with purpose. Fortunately, Facebook’s quest to eliminate fake news has led to the shut-down of 30,000 fake accounts – and that’s just in France!

Twitter Social Media Stats

Painting with broad strokes, Twitter’s users are young (36% are 18-29 years old), college-educated (29%), and earning $75k or more per year (30%). They’re also pretty evenly split gender-wise: 24% of American men who are online use it, compared to 25% of women.

Here are some other stats worth knowing:

20. 79%of Twitter accounts are based outside the United States. (Source: Twitter)
21. There are plenty of users in the U.S., however – more than 67 million to be exact. That’s 24% of online Americans. (Source: Pew Research Center)
22. 81% of Millennials check Twitter at least once per day. (Source: Pew Research Center)
23. 65.8 % of U.S. companies with more than 100 employees use Twitter for marketing. (Source: eMarketer)
24. The most popular Tweet of 2016 was “limonada” – the Spanish word for “lemonade.” It was retweeted more than 1.3 million times after Spanish gamer Elrubius offered prizes to those who retweeted him. (Source: Zephoria)
25. Katy Perry has the most Twitter followers at 102 million. (Source: Statista) Justin Bieber is the most mentioned.
26. There were more than 100k customer service inquires to major airlines alone on Twitter each month in 2016. (Source: Socialdraft)
27. 60% of users expect brands to respond to Twitter inquiries within an hour. (Source: Daily Infographic)
28. Organizations that partnered with Twitter – like the NFL and others – produced 600 hours of live stream content. This attracted 31 million unique viewers to more than 400 events in sports (52%), news/politics (38%) and entertainment (10%). (Source: Mediakix)
29. Tweets with images are retweeted 150% more than tweets without images. (Source: Buffer)

Instagram Social Media Stats

Photo- and video-sharing app Instagram is used by 90% of brands. Here are a few reasons why:

30. The bulk of Instagram’s users (59%) are between 18-29 years old. Of internet users 30-49 years old, 33% use Instagram. 38% of them are women, while 26% of them are men. (Source: Pew Research Center)
31. Though 78 million Instagram users hail from the U.S., 80% of Instagram userscome from outside the U.S. (Source: Adweek)
32. Instagram’s monthly active advertisers have grown from 200k in March of 2015 to more than 1 million in March of 2016. (Source: Instagram)
33. Pizza, sushi and steak are the top three most-Instagrammed foods. (Source: The Telegraph)
34. 60% of top brands on Instagram use the same filter across all posts to achieve a consistent look. (Source: Webdam)
35. Instagram Stories are seen by more than 250 million daily active viewers – beating Snapchat, which originated Stories. (Source: CNBC)
36. Instagram influencers with 6-million+ followers can charge up to $100,000 for a single sponsored shot. (Source: brandchannel)
37. 70% of hashtags on Instagram are branded. (Source: Sprout Social)
38. Nearly 50% of Instagram captions and comments globally contain emojis. Luckily, emojis can be hashtagged and searched. (Source: Engadget)
39. Product posts perform best on Instagram, comprising 65% of posts. User photos of brand products increase conversions by 4.5 – 9.6% , depending on whether consumers see the photo or interact with it. (Source: L2 Inc.)
40. More than 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram daily. (Source: HubSpot)

YouTube Social Media Stats

Processing more than 3 billion searches per month, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine next to Google. Here are stats to help you make the most of this video hosting social network:

41. By 2025 half of viewers under 32 years old will not subscribe to a pay TV service; already 6 out of 10 people prefer watching video online to watching live TV. (Source: Think with Google)
42. People of all ages watch YouTube: 18- to 24-year-olds, 11%; 25- to 34-year-olds, 23%;  35- to 44-year-olds, 26%; 45- to 54-year-olds, 16%; 55- to 64-year-olds, 8%, 65+,  3%; unknown age, 14%. (Source: Fortunelords.com)
43. Searches for “how-to” videos are growing 70% year over year. (Source: Search Engine Land)
44. YouTube mobile reaches more users in the 18- to 34-year-old and 18- to 49-year-old demographics than any cable network in the U.S. This is also true for YouTube overall. (Source: YouTube)
45. 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. (Source: Google)
46. Most subscribed-to YouTube channel: PewDiePie, with more than 56 million subscribers. (Source: The Guardian)
47. 323 days worth of YouTube videos are viewed on Facebook every minute. (Source: Adweek)
48. 91% of teen internet users aged 13-17 rank YouTube as their favorite app to use. These teens look to YouTube stars above and beyond TV or movie stars. (Source: eMarketer)
49. The most-viewed, user-submitted video of all time is “Charlie bit my finger” with more than 852 million views. As for brand videos, Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” just shot past Psy’s “Gangnam Style” for most-watched with nearly 3 billion views.

Pinterest Social Media Stats

With 175 million active daily users, Pinterest can no longer be questioned as a social network worth exploring. Here are stats that further prove its merits:

51. Pinterest has major potential for virality. 80% of pins are re-pins, compared to 1.4% of retweets on Twitter. (Source: Jeff Bullas)
52. It’s not all about ideas on Pinterest. 87% of pinners purchase what they see, and 93% plan to. (Source: Hootsuite)
53. Women dominate Pinterest with 45% of online American females using the platform – but 17% of online American men do as well. (Source: Pew Research Center)
54. 25% of all retail website referral traffic is driven by Pinterest. (Source: Meltwater)
55. Food and fashion boards reign supreme – with 100 million and 146 million boards respectively. (Source: SocialPilot)
56. 45% of Pinterest users surf the app while watching TV. Huge cross-promotional opportunities here. (Source: HubSpot)
57. 83% of active Pinterest users would prefer to follow a brand over a celebrity. (Source: SocialPilot)
58. 80% of pinners access Pinterest via mobile devices. (Source: Omnicore Agency)
59. With a Pinterest for Business profile you can click to see stats for your pins – including number of times they’ve appeared, close-ups, clicks and saves. (Source: Pinterest)

Stats to drive strategy wherever you need to be

There’s no one way to approach social marketing – as each brand’s needs differ from the next, and social users differ as well. The above stats can point you in the right direction, but social listening and sentiment analysis are necessary to refine your strategy for optimal success.

You can’t be – and don’t need to be – on every social platform, but the information above should help you assess the usefulness of the top five platforms for your brand.

Maybe you didn’t think you needed a YouTube channel – but can now see the value it offers. Maybe you assumed you didn’t have an audience on Pinterest, but have reason to question that now.

Apply your social media analytics tools to understand how to get the most from these social networks if your audience is there. And keep tracking results in real-time – because social trends are bound to change again, as they always do. As long as you’re following along, you won’t miss a beat.

Want to learn more about finding your audience on any social channel? Get in touch and we’ll show you how!

Image from Paul Inkles

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