We Are Social and Hootsuite have published the usual annual report, “Digital 2022 Global Overview Report”, with the collection of data and statistics relating to online and digital. The data, mainly updated at the end of 2021, as always provide a very complete overview.
As of January 2022, there are 4.62 billion social media users worldwide. This figure is equal to 58.4% of the total world population, although it should be noted that social media “users” may not represent unique individuals. Having made this necessary specification, on a like-for-like basis, global social media users have grown by over 10% in the last 12 months, with 424 million new users starting to use social media in 2021. With an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes a day, social media accounts for the largest single share of time spent on online media, with 35% of the total. The time people spend using social media has also grown again over the past year, with an increase of 2 minutes per day (+ 1.4%).
Worldwide, nearly 1 in 4 internet users (22.9%), aged 16 to 64, use social media for work-related activities. This figure is considerably higher in many developing economies. In Italy we are 1 in 10 (9.8%). Fourth-last out of 48 nations considered by the report. And more than 1 in 4 internet users (27.6%), always aged 16 to 64, discover new brands, products and services through social media advertisements, a figure only slightly lower than the value of TV ads (31.1% ). On average, each social media user now uses an average of 7.5 different social platforms each month. In Italy 6. 98.5% of users of one of the main social platforms also use at least one other social platform.
Among the many available data, we decided to focus on this aspect, which we believe to be of interest for the definition of the presence of your company / brand, institution or organization on social networks. Advertisers can reach almost any user of a given social platform on at least one other platform. This should give marketers more confidence in exploring a wider variety of social opportunities, knowing that individual platforms only offer relatively low levels of single audience reach.
In fact, do not let us be deceived by the data, thinking that therefore with your presence on Facebook you can cover all those who use the main Western social networks. In fact, if people use different social networks it is evidently because they find distinct content of interest. This is a clear indication of the mechanisms of distribution and aggregation of the proposed contents, which obviously must be different, and not the same as often happens. In fact, according to Istat data relating to 2021 as regards companies and ICT, a little more than half overall [56%] of companies with more than 10 employees use at least one social platform. It drops to 54% for companies with between 10 and 49 employees to rise to 77% for companies with more than 250 employees.
Instead, the Italian companies that use at least two social platforms are only 27% of the total. Exactly half. It reaches 54% for large companies while it drops to 25% for small ones. The fact that just over a quarter of companies in our country use at least two social networks means that most companies only use one. Most likely Facebook. And it is a clear indicator of how, 22 years after the “mythical” Clutrain Manifesto and its most famous thesis “markets are conversations”, the vast majority of companies in our country do not have a strategy of presence on social networks, overseeing , often badly or even very badly, only one social media / network.
