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Hey you!
There is a sector that is far from having experienced the crisis: social networks. Number of users, volume of interactions, mobile usage… The data has exploded in the last 12 months! And precisely, a little challenge just for you: can you name 1 person in your circle who doesn’t use either mobile, social networks or internet? On our side, we didn’t find one. And it’s normal, more than half of the humanity is connected. Passion Media presents you the subject.
Data protection, an essential subject
This new frenzy for digital and social networks has also been accompanied by new regulations. The reason? Data retention is a very sensitive subject, to which everyone is more and more attentive. Brands have to adapt their tools and protect their users. Apple, for example, has understood this. It has changed its privacy policy and deployed several tools allowing users to choose more easily the data they want to share or not. Governments are also following the trend. This is the famous RGPD, these cookies that we see appearing on every site we visit. This measure aims to protect online privacy.
The main results of the study
Here are some key figures at the end of July 2021:
67% is equipped and uses a cell phone, that’s 2.3% growth in 1 year
The number of Internet users has increased by more than 6% over the last 12 months
There are now 4.80 billion Internet users in the world. That’s more than 61% of the total world population.
On social networks, the number of users has increased by more than 13% since this time last year. That’s about half a billion more users over 12 months.
In total, there are an estimated 4.48 billion social media users worldwide, or more than 57% of the total global population.
Social media growth continues
The timid recovery of activity at the beginning of 2021 has not put a damper on this growth. On the contrary. The number of unique users worldwide has increased by 520 million in the past year, an annual growth rate of more than 13%.
And there are two key phenomena:
- The frequency of use is increasing
- The number of users is increasing
More than 1 in 9 social media users started using social platforms for the first time in the last 12 months. There is still one important point to note here. Facebook recently changed its calculation method in order to maintain the calibration of their model. This change would have resulted in the calculation of about 70 million more users than their global total. The data may have been inflated slightly but the results are still impressive. And by the way, Facebook would currently be approaching the 3 billion monthly active users mark. It seems that this figure could be passed as early as 2022.
TikTok plays a key role in this growth
The TikTok platform continues to keep its user numbers secret. However, it is possible to get an estimate. According to Sensor Tower’s data, the app would have been downloaded about 57 million times in the month of June 2021 alone. So that means three things:
- TikTok continues its growth
- TikTok is slowly gaining impact over social networks
- TikTok has become the most downloaded social network this year ahead of Facebook
Time spent on the Internet is decreasing
The average time spent by users on the Internet each day has slightly decreased since the last report in April. This decrease amounts to about one minute per day (30 seconds on mobile, 30 seconds on computer). This is still a very small decrease when compared to the overall time spent on the Internet each day. This figure amounts to more than 7 hours per day, double the time spent watching television. The latter has increased by 3 minutes daily according to the study.
The share of time spent on social networks is increasing
We therefore spend slightly less time on the internet. On the other hand, we are proportionally more present on social networks. The survey reveals that Internet users would have spent about 2 minutes more on social platforms each day during the last 3 months, compared to the values of the previous quarter. We also see that “traditional” media have benefited from the context. The time spent reading physical newspapers and magazines has increased by more than 8% in the last three months. That’s about 4 extra minutes per day. Time spent listening to the radio has increased by more than 3% over the same period.
That’s about 2 minutes per day. This echoes the emergence of audio formats (Clubhouse, podcasts, etc…). A trend that will be interesting to observe in the future.
Internet users are more and more on social networks
The figure is striking: more than 95% of Internet users between 16 and 64 years old use social networks and messaging services every month. It seems that in terms of usage time, Facebook is even ahead of WhatsApp. In terms of internet searches, more than 5 out of 6 internet users aged 16 to 64 visit search engines and web portals every month. We also notice that almost 6 out of 10 Internet users declare to have visited an online shopping platform in the past month, and more than 50% of Internet users declare to make purchases or search for products online every week. This echoes the explosion of online shopping, due in particular to the context conducive to this use (confinement, curfew, closed shops, etc. …).
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The past year has changed the use of the internet and social networks. New trends are emerging (more usage, online shopping, audio format, etc…). It remains to be seen if they will be long-lasting or if these trends are ephemeral.
