Thanks Simon Kemp and the team at Kepios for this quarters “global statshot report”, where Simon offers the current situation for social media, mobile, search and the internet.

The report is free to download and you can get a copy here and all of the reports are available for free here. 

Let's dig into this breathtaking trends. 

Trend 1.

2 in 3 people on earth are now online.

5.44 Billion people are now online which equates to 67.1% of the world's population using the internet in April 2024.

With 2/3s of the world's population now connected to the internet, this means that internet users are now supermajority status.

This makes another momentous milestone on the world's digital journey.

Internet user growth continues to increase, with internet usage worldwide growing by 3.3% of the last 12 months. With 178 million new users getting connected to the internet over the last 12 months. 

11 countries in the world have internet adoption rates of 99% and more and half (50%) of the population is online in 179 different nations. 

There are still 12 countries that have adoption rates of less than 25% and 2.663 billion people still remain offline in 2024.  So there is still time to go before we reach universal connectivity. 

Trend 2.

The number of people on social media continues to grow

Social media users have grown by ¼ of Billion new users over the last year. 

Taking the total number of people using social world wide to 5.074 Billion.

This means that 62.6% of the world's population are now active on social media.

So don't let those clickbait articles about “everybody” leaving social media fool you.  

And these user growth figures show sign of slowing! 

So how much time do these 62% of the world's population stay on social media?

The average person spends 2 hours and 20 mins a day on social media, which is why social media has become more than a place where people post photos of their lunch.

Social media is a place where people do brand research. 

3. Brand research

The next slide shows that people up to the age of 34, tend to use social media over search engines to search for for purchases.

People up to the age of 55, tend to turn to social media, after they have searched on search engines.

I'm not saying that people under the age of 35 don't use search engines, but social media tends to be the weapon of choice as the answer is more nuanced. 

For example, on a search engine if we search for “what is the capital of Nigeria?” it gives us the answer, where as if we search on “what is the best CRM in the world?” all the CRM vendors will buy that search. 

Search Vs Discovery

We often come to social media for “discovery”, which is where we don't know the question to ask.  It is in these situations where sales people empowered on social will be found. We have clients telling us they are often doing multi-million dollar deals in these situations.

That is, the prospect find them, (to do this the sales people must be in the person's network or networks network, which requires a connection strategy) they have to have buyer-centric profile.  That is they have to look interesting, look like experts and look approachable for the buyers when they find them.  That is the buyers will walk towards these empowered sales people and with the right conversation with the salesperson, buy. Third they need to be sharing insight, (not brochures and brochureware) as it's insight (not brochures) that they buyers will have searched for.

The transformation that's taking place is that buyers will walk towards socially empowered salespeople. Where as buyers usually run away from non-socially enabled salespeople. 

Thanks again to Simon Kemp for the data and some of these words! 

I highly recommend that you follow Simon on LinkedIn. 

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.