100 social media statistics for 2012

We all love statistics, specially when they are about social media. I’ve made life so much easier by compiling all the statistics I could find over the past month or so in one handy bulleted article, including the following stats: Facebook, Facebook in business, Twitter, Twitter in business, LinkedIn, YouTube, Other (social networks), General social media stats, Mobile, QR codes and Facebook in Australia stats. Feel free to let me know if any of them are outdated or if I’ve missed any good ones. Enjoy! Note: I’ve now posted another social media statistics article in September 2012 (with 216 stats!)

Global social media statistics

Facebook

There are now more than 800 million active Facebook users (this was reached on July 1 2011)
200 million accounts were added in 2011
Facebook is the most visited website on the internet (reaching one trillion pageviews on June 30 2011)
11% of the world population has a Facebook account
There are more Facebook users than cars (800 million vs 750 million)
50% log onto Facebook every day
The average user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 pages, events and groups
The average user spends 700 mins per month on the site
Every 60 seconds on Facebook there are:
- 510,000 posted comments
- 293,000 status updates
- 136,000 uploaded photos
30 billion pieces of content are shared each month
Facebook reached 55% of the world’s global audience accounting for roughly 75% of time spent on social networking sites and one in every seven minutes spent online globally
Facebook is blocked in China
Almost 50% of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up – 28% before even getting out of bed
20 million Facebook applications are installed per day
Over 250 million people access Facebook via their mobile phone
In just 20 minutes, over 1 million links are shared, 1.5 million event invites are sent, 1.8 million statuses are updated, 2 million friend requests are accepted, 2.7 million photos are uploaded, 2.7 million messages are sent and 10.2 million comments are made
More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook

FB Business

FritoLay set a World Record with 1,575,161 Facebook likes in 24 hours on April 11 2011
95% of Facebook wall posts are not answered by brands
Auto-posting to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70%
56% of consumers say they are more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a fan on Facebook
Two most popular reasons for liking a brand on Facebook: 1. because they are a customer (58%), 2. to get access to discounts and promotions (57%)
There are over 36.5M fans of Coca-Cola on Facebook

Twitter

Twitter has 225,000,000 users
100 million of these users are logging in at least once a month, 50 million are logging in every day
190,000,000 tweets are sent on average per day
1 billion tweets were sent every five days in 2011
The record is 25,088 tweets per second (when Castle in the Sky was broadcast in Japan)
A great majority of tweets are just 40 characters long
The average user has 115 followers
Lady Gaga is the most followed person on Twitter with over 17.8M followrs
40% of Twitter users don’t tweet, but instead use it to keep up to date
55% access Twitter via mobile
Twitter handles 1.6 billion queries per day
Nearly 500,000 users are added each day
About 21% of Indonesians are on Twitter, making them the most Twitter-addicted nation
Japan is the only country where Twitter is more popular than Facebook

Twitter Business:

34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter and 20% have closed deals
Tweets that include verbs have a 2% higher shareability than average tweets

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has 135,000,000 users (as at Nov 2011), up from about 85 million in late 2010
Every second two new users sign up
Age demographics are: 21% 18-24, 36% 25-34, 36% 35-54, 7% 55+
LinkedIn membership includes executives from every company listed on the Fortune 500
49% of LinkedIn users have a household income over $100k

YouTube

YouTube has 490 million unique visitors per month (as at Feb 2011), which generates 92 billion page views
In 2010 YouTube reached 700 billion playbacks
35 hours of video is uploaded every minute
More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years)

Google Plus

Google+ was the fastest social network to reach 10 million users at 16 days (Twitter 780 days and Facebook 852)
Google Plus experienced an increase of 55% in traffic in December 2011 from November 2011
Though Google+ is secretive about the number of users, it has been reported that there are 62 million Google+ users (Source: Paul Allen)

Other Social Networks

3,500 photos are uploaded each second on flickr
Flickr hosts over 5 billion images
Instagram reached 13 million users 13 months after launch
There are over 150,000,000 photos uploaded with instagram
Foursquare sees 2,000,000 check-ins a week
15 million people have Foursquare accounts (as at Dec 2011)
Wikipedia hosts over 17 million articles
There are over 91,000 Wikipedia contributors

QR Codes

QR code uptake has increased 4589% from early 2010 to early 2011
56% of QR codes appear on product packaging
The majority of users expect to receive a coupon or deal from scanning a QR code
11 out of 50 Fortune companies are incorporating QR codes into their marketing strategy
68% of QR codes are scanned via an iPhone

General social media statistics

Women are more active on social media than men – 55% vs 45%
Social media is responsible for one third of the web traffic in Malaysia
North American consumers show the strongest interest in using social media for deals (45%), followed by consumers in Asia-Pacific (34%) and Latin America (33%)
A 2011 study confirmed that social media users dine out more and are more likely to become return customers
43% of all online consumers follow or are a fan of a brand
57% of people talk to people more online than they do in real life
15% of 16-24 year olds prefer to receive customer service via social media over any other method, compared to just 8% of 25-34 year olds and 3% of those aged 35-44
Social media use is becoming much more even across age groups (see graph below)

Mobile

Facebook alone accounts for 10% of all mobile data on the iPhone
Globally more people own a mobile phone than a toothbrush
There are over 500,000 apps in Apple’s App Store (as at Dec 2011)
There are 400,000 apps for the Android operating system (as at Dec 2011)
Of the world’s 4 billion mobile phones, 1.08 billion are smartphones
Smartphone users are twice more active on social media than non smartphone users
60% admit to using their device while going to the bathroom
86% of mobile users are watching TV while using a mobile phone
Over 200 million access Facebook from a mobile device and 91% of all mobile internet use is “social” related
By 2014 mobile internet use should overtake desktop internet use
½ of all local searches are done on mobile devices
Half of Twitter’s users use Twitter on their mobile
There are 200 million + views of YouTube clips on mobiles every day

Facebook in Australia statistics

Approximately 100,000 new Facebook accounts were created each month in 2011
There are over 10.7 million Australians actively using Facebook (log in at least once every 30 days) – over 60% of the online population
54% of Australian Facebook users are female, 46% are male.
The largest age group of Facebook users in Australia is 25-34 year olds, followed by 18-24 year olds.
In 2011, more than 28% of all Australians on Facebook were between the ages of 35 and 54
Brisbane is the most Facebook-obsessed city, with the highest percentage of Facebook penetration, followed by Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
Three areas of Melbourne Airport were included in the top 5 most popular places to check-in in Australia for 2011 (including number 1 and 2)
The average Australian user spends 26 minutes and 27 seconds on Facebook every time they log and will spend 6 hours and 46 minutes on Facebook per month
The most talked about topics on Facebook Australia in 2011 were:

Planking
Cyclone Yasi
Census
Death of Osama Bin Laden
Skrillex
Victorian floods
Daniel Morcombe
Charlie Sheen
Death of Amy Winehouse
Cadel Evans.

Update: I have just written a new article with a further 100 social media statistics, which you can find here: 100 more social media statistics for 2012. Update2: I have just written another article with a further 100 social media, mobile and Internet statistics here: 100 social media, mobile and internet statistics 2012 (March).

For statistics on Australian brands on Facebook, see my article from Sep 2011: http://thesocialskinny.com/australian-brands-on-facebook-statistics-and-best-practice/
Other sources used to collate these stats:

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/

http://socialmediatoday.com/node/401475

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-statistics_b17188

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2134516/social-media-2011-highlights-included

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/deal-with-it-discounts-drive-brand-love-on-social-media/

http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-billions-2011-12

http://www.web123.com.au/blog/facebook-australia-2011-stats-revealed.aspx

http://socialtimes.com/google-traffic-up-55-hits-49m-visits-in-december_b87156

http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/social-media-growth-australia-2011-infograph/

http://mashable.com/2012/01/09/tweets-by-country/

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-2011-records_b17430