We haven’t had any facts and figures about social media for a while, so here’s a couple of statistical goodies for you to enjoy!
Twitter: Some data released by French data analysis firm, Semiocast, suggests that there are over half a billion accounts on Twitter at the moment. While many of these are likely to be robots or other spam, this still an impressive figure. More from Mashable or check out this infographic from earlier in the year.
Facebook: Glut yourself on the smorgasbord of statistics provided for us by All Facebook, which cover the growth in users of the service from the end of 2010 onwards. Lots of eye-watering graphs, here, including an exponetial growth in the use of mobile devices to access the network. Read, and be amazed.
And if that’s not enough for you, then watch this video about the growth of the different social media networks – thanks to All Twitter for this link.
Thanks Honey, the video was informative, with quite a few things in it that were surprises to me.
In relation to social media stats have you come across anything which is actually useful for organisations around generational differences? Yes, we all know younger people are online more and use mobile devices more, but I can’t help wondering if older people who are using social media might be more likely to use it to be active or critical citizens, or to engage with voluntary orgs etc. than younger people who might use it purely for connecting with friends.
Hi Lorna
that’s a really interesting question – is social media use connected with active citizenship – and not one that I’ve seen examined anywhere other than the descriptions of the ‘riotcleanup’ hashtag. What would be great to see is a survey of UK social media usage which gathered info from a variety of age groups, and which asked about this type of usage.
This might also be a good one for local infrastructure organisations or VCS assemblies to ask of their memberships!