Keeping up to date with changing social networks demographics can sometimes be time consuming.
It is however essential for people involved in any sort of social media marketing and can be a big factor in whether or not campaigns achieve the desired effects or not.
For example, someone who wasn’t really keeping up to date with changing demographics on social media might not be aware that using Twitter is not going to be as effective now as it once was (New to Twitter? Check Twitter for beginners). Admittedly, this is not an extreme example (the one more extreme would definitely be MySpace few years back) but nonetheless, I hope you see the point.
A more likely scenario might be missing out on new opportunities – such as TikTok for example, which has a rapidly growing user base (currently at 500 million active users), especially popular amongst 16-24 year-old users, and would be absolutely excellent for communicating with that particular demographic.
Luckily, many agencies and leaders in the social media industry publish annual reports where you, as a marketer, can find out quite a few facts on every social networks demographics out there. So, for example, in 2019, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram keep on growing. According to many different reports, YouTube and Facebook continue to battle for the title of market leader. YouTube is currently the market leader with 73% US adults using it, while Facebook is a close 2nd.
When it comes to social networks demographics and usage by generation, Millennials remain leaders. More than 90% of Millennials use social media, while other age groups are less active on social media. In addition to this, people tend to spend an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social networks and messaging.
Social media users also tend to access their social channels via mobile devices. Some studies even suggest that staggering 91% of all users use their phones to spend time on social media. These statistics can clearly be helpful to every marketer who creates strategies for social media and if they are ignored – all social media efforts may become fruitless (for a more in depth statistics regarding social media in 2019, you should take a look at Oberlo’s social media report)
Pinterest remains a go-to social network for any business looking to target women, especially moms, since more than 80% of US women aged 18-64 with children use Pinterest.
LinkedIn on the other hand is a great way to get in touch with professionals who are educated and have higher incomes. In addition to this, 57% of LinkedIn users are men, while 43% are women. So if your product targets educated young professionals, you should definitely consider using LinkedIn.
While all these social networks mentioned above are still popular, one that seems to be falling behind is Twitter. In the last couple of years other networks took over and less and less people use Twitter nowadays. Only 22% of US adults use it, compared to 73% using YouTube or 37% using Instagram. Whether Twitter will manage to restore its former glory – it remains to be seen.
Now that you know some of the most important statistics, you can understand why a quick glance at up-to-date demographics every few months is pretty good policy for social media marketers (even part-time ones!). And you’d really be a fool not to do so with so many lovely infographics on offer, organising and presenting all that useful information for you in an accessible and clear way – one of which I’ve posted below).
