25 Insane Social Media Facts

Despite being a work in progress, social media has certainly come a long way in the past 5 years. In the early days of social media, it was viewed as a fad that was all the rage among teenagers.

Today, teenagers are interacting with their grandparents via social media. Quite an interesting shift in how social media networks are now being perceived by the public.

With essentially everyone signing up to some sort of social media network, it only makes sense that you know as much as possible about social media. How else can your business thrive online without knowing some stats and data? So, just in case you need a little help in managing your social media presence, here are 25 insane facts about social media.

1. Ward Christensen, the co-founder of the CBBS bulletin board was the first bulletin board system (BBS) ever brought online. Christensen, along with partner Randy Suess, began development during a blizzard in Chicago, Illinois, and later established CBBS four weeks later, on February 16, 1978.
2.  There are over 10 million Facebook “apps”.
3.  The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-64 year age bracket. That’s a growth of 79% since 2012. For Facebook and Google Plus, the 45 to 54 year age bracket at 46% and 56% respectively are the fastest growing demographics.
4. 93% of marketers are using social media. However, only 9% of marketing companies have full-time bloggers.
5. Food is the top category on Pinterest making up 57% of discussions.
6. 23% of Facebook users check their account at least 5 times a day.
7.  4.2 billion people access social media sites via mobile devices with 189 million Facebook users being ‘mobile only’.
8. 60% of Google+ users login at least once a day.
9.  Despite privacy concerns, only 25% of Facebook users utilize privacy settings.
10. According to this study, mothers with children under the age of 5 are the most active on social media.
11. Despite having a lower percentage of users than Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest, 2 new members join LinkedIn every second.
12. 80% of all Pinterest pins are actually repins.
13. Users send out 58 million tweets per day, with 9,100 happening every second. However, there are 222 million Twitters who just watch other people’s tweets.
14.  The +1 button is hit at least 5 billion times per day.
15. LinkedIn has over 3 million company pages with over 1 billion endorsements.
16. There are 684,478 pieces of content shared on Facebook; 3,600 new photos on Instagram; 2,083 check-ins on Foursquare during every minute of every day.
17. People are spending 1 out of every 7 minutes on Facebook when online. Facebook users typically are spending 10.5 billion minutes (almost 20,000 years) on the social network. And, that’s excluding mobile devices.
18. After being inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes, the original name for Twitter was twttr. Other options were Twitch, Smssy and the not-creppy-at-all Friendstalker.
19. 91% of mobile Internet access is for social activities with 73% of smartphone owners accessing social networks through apps at least once per day.
20. Instagram has already had more than 16 billion photos uploaded since debuting in 2010. 5 million photos are uploaded daily.
21. If social media companies were countries: Followed by China, Facebook  would be the world’s most populous country with over 1.1 billion users. Google Plus (693 million active users) would be third and Twitter (554 million users) would be fourth. That’s ahead both India and the U.S.
22. YouTube has over 1 billion unique visitors per month and reaches the coveted 18-34 year old demographic more than any cable network.
23. The male vs. female ratio of social media users is as follows: Facebook – 60% female/40% male; Twitter – 60% female/40% male; Pinterest – 79% female/21% male; Google Plus – 29% female/71% male; LinkedIn – 55% female/45% male.
24. Around 46% of web users will look towards social media when making a purchase.
25. How popular is social media? It’s the most popular activity online. Yep. It’s even more popular than porn.

We also thought this infographic had some useful facts (note: we are not affiliated with its creators):

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