It’s hard to believe that Facebook will be ten years old this February and yet social media still seems new to many of us. Brands are struggling as much as they ever have done to understand what to do with it, and which networks actually have any real value. I noticed a number of social challenges that brands faced in 2013 but probably the two most common questions I got asked were:
- Which social networks should I focus on?
- How much of my time and resources should I allocate to each one?
The answers to these questions are not as complicated as people often think, but neither is there correct answer to either of them. Many people have written blog posts suggesting that they have the answer – but rather than add my own opinions to that long list, I thought I’d just look at the data to see where the world seems to have been spending it’s time over the last 12 years. (Infographic created in Adobe Photoshop obviously!)…
The figures… source by backtohack
I’ve purposely focused here on the total number of user profiles for each network*. I did this purely for the sake of comparison (rather than daily / monthly active users), so before anyone bursts a blood vessel and calls me out in the comments, let’s save the messy debate around active v inactive fans for another time. All I want to do here is look at which social networks people have chosen to join over the last decade or so.
The figures themselves highlight a couple of interesting points that social media executives often miss:
- There are almost as many social profiles just among these 21 networks, as there are people in the world!
- Many business people forget that China has 3 of the world’s largest and most powerful social networks. (Sina Weibo for example has the same market penetration in China that Twitter does in the US).
- Some of the Middle Eastern brands I spoke to last year told me that YouTube was far more valuable to their brand than either Twitter and Facebook, and they built their social strategies accordingly.
- Many Spanish brands have chosen to focus their efforts on the local network Tuenti instead of Facebook.
- The oldest social network on the list Friendster, has a surprisingly large and active fan base (admittedly now with a different purpose than it was created for).
- Bebo is still going and planning to be properly re-launched again by original co-founder Michael Birch.
- Google+ (the network we all like to poke fun at), has become the place for commenting on YouTube.
- Market analysts suggested in 2013 that Pinterest (not even 4 years old), had double the click-through-rate of Twitter and drove 2x the average order value of Facebook, even though it only has 5% of the user base.
- Russian network VK is bigger than Instagram globally with a massive 228m registered users.
- SnapChat (hacking issues aside), 2013 saw more photos distributed on SnapChat (up to 400m each day) than there was on Facebook.
- But… old-timer Orkut (the forgotten Brazilian network owned by Google) is still “bigger” than the trendy new kid on the block SnapChat.
“All of this is very interesting, but just because these appear to be the world’s largest networks, still doesn’t mean you should be paying attention to them…”
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