This blog is based on the data reports created by Simon Kemp, in the July 2023 global snapshot, which you can find in the report here.  

Please note the report is free and not gated.

What can we gain from this report?

How many people are active on social media?

60.6% of the world's population is now on active on social media, this is a year on year increase of 3.7% or 173 million people. 

This is another milestone along our journey to universal connectivity. 

In fact social media adoption accelerated over the last 3 months. 

We talk to a lot of companies about the explosion of social media use, but it is always a shock when you remind people how social media has changed society and the world of business.

Social media is not in the hands of a few geeks or a few people sharing photos of their grandchildren.  Social media is a tool, everybody uses everyday.  We have clients who use our social selling methodology to create $multi-million deals.  In fact the question to business today is, how many $multi-million deals are you doing daily on social media and if you are not doing them, why not? 

What does active on social media mean?

The average person is spending 2 hours 26 minutes..... a day on social media.

Another figure that people seem to find amazing and just backs up the need for a business to understand digital and be where their prospects and clients are, social social media. 

Why do people use social media?

To find product to buy ..... in fact the older people get, the more likely they are to use social media, to find products to buy!

What we see is that more and more people are using social media for search, in fact many people will search on social media and use search engines at the same time.  Why?

We know if we search on Google and ask "what's the best CRM system in the world?" we don't get a real answer , as 10,000 CRM vendors will buy that search.  A completely different answer if we ask "what's the best CRM system in the world?" on social media. Why? Because on social media search is based on your network and many CRM vendors, because of their lack of understanding of how social works, won't be connect to you and will therefore not see your question. 

When you break that down by age group, you can see that most people under the age of 34 use social networks to search more than they use search engines. 

Let's break this down by platform, clearly the B2C platforms tend to show higher usage than the B2B platforms.

Percentage of people that use social media for work

Are influencers used on social media?

While these figures are probably more associated with business to consumer (B2C), where influencers have probably reach epidemic proportions.  They market is still very immature in the business to business (B2B) space. This is mainly as influencers tend to be used and positioned as "paid media".

Social media has overtaken world of mouth as the place that buyers use to find products and services,. 

Social media has now overtaken world of mouth, when it comes to introducing people to new brands, products and services. 

Use of ad-blockers

Use of ad-blockers and the reasons for using them. 

The is a female gender gap in the usage of social media

That said, we still have a digital gender gap with women, 19% less likely than men to use the internet. 

In fact, women's adoption of connected tech has slowed over the last 12 months. 

In fact, 100 million women need to come online every year if we are to meet the United nations sustainable development goals.  Which is a 65% increase on current growth rates. 

The average mobile user now consumes over 20 Gbytes a month. 

With 126 Billion Gbytes of data being consumed per quarter, this is up 36% from the previous quarter.  A lot of this is down to the increase of video.  Video is now a quarter of all data transmitted over cellular networks.  Social networking impacts 8.5% of all data on cellular networks. 

People under the age of 55 are more likely to get their news from social media than television. 

Just a reminder.

This blog is based on the data reports created by Simon Kemp, in the July 2023 global snapshot, which you can find in the report here.  

Please note the report is free and not gated.

Want to know more about social selling, check out my new book

"social selling techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition".

In this brand new edition, I have updated all the text, I have also got 15 practitioners, so people who are doing this already to explain how they are get (practical) business benefit. From the CEO that has been running a digital business for over 18 months to sales leaders who use social selling every day.  

Articles on how these business have and are implementing digital, from Mercer, Telstra Purple, Ring Central, Cyberhawk, Namos, Ericsson, DLA Ignite and more.

What does Mark Schaefer, Marketing guru think of the book "social selling - techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition"? watch the video here

It's available on Amazon worldwide.  Link to Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here.