20 Mind-Blowing Social Media Statistics

Tweet this.  It’s around six months since I last threw out some truly mindboggling pieces of data surrounding social media. So, what’s happened between then and now?

I try to put as much information as I can into Econsultancy’s Social Media Statistics, which is part of our Stats Compendium (a truly awesome resource) but I find it’s always interesting to go back and review the old against the new.

So, I’ve collected as much as I can from my previous insane snippets of data and benchmarked it against the here and now, alongside rooting out some new stuff for you to mull over.

If six months ago, it wasn’t a compelling case to consider social media in the marketing mix, then this hopefully might change your mind...



•Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.

•Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.

•LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.

•Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.

•Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about.

•More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.

•Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.

•Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.

•There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.

•Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.

•Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.



Okay, so now some new stuff that’s worth considering when looking at social media marketing that I’ve not included in previous posts:

•There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.

•There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.

•Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.

•The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.

•More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.

•Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.

•15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati's new State of the Blogosphere.

•At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.

•About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.

•India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.

•More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.

•70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.

•38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.

•More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Impressive stuff, but as always, take these stats with a pinch of salt. As before, no single piece of information can be used to base an online strategy upon, or be used as a forecast as to the direction a specific social media channel may take in the future - you need to fully understand your marketing and business objectives before launching off into this apparently vast space.


By Jake Hird
[Image source: thekeithhall, via Flickr. Various rights reserved]