• For context, as of Dec 2019, total worldwide population is 7.8 billion
• The internet has 4.54 billion users
• There are 3.725 billion active social media users
• On average, people have 7.6 social media accounts
• The average daily time spent on social is 142 minutes a day
• 91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media channels
• 81% of all small and medium businesses use some kind of social platform
• Social media users grew by 328 million between October 2018 and October 2019.
• That works out at 10 new social media users per second.
• Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp handle 60 billion messages a day
• When asked 81% of teenagers felt social media has a positive effect on their lives
• Another study found the effect of social media on teenagers was ‘trivial’
• A third from the Royal Society for Public Health found there were a range of negative and positive effects:

Social media business statistics

• Social networks earned an estimated $8.3 billion from advertising in 2015
• $90bn was spent on social network advertising in 2019
• 38% of organizations plan to spend more than 20% of their total advertising budgets on social media channels in 2015, up from 13% a year ago
• Only 20 Fortune 500 companies actually engage with their customers on Facebook, while 83% have a presence on Twitter
• People aged 55-64 are more than twice as likely to engage with branded content than those 28 or younger
• 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles
• 78 percent of people who complain to a brand via Twitter expect a response within an hour