According to a new study, social networks today have more than 4.7 billion users worldwide. But their use is constantly evolving and the insolent success of TikTok should be put into perspective.
Social networks are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives. Of the 7.98 billion people living on Earth, 5.03 billion use the internet in July 2022 – for an average of 2h29 per day. As for the number of social network users, it continues to increase with 227 million newcomers over the past year, reaching a total of 4.7 billion. In total, 59% of the population uses social networks!
However, as the report indicates Digital 2022 realized Hootsuite, a company specialized in the management of social networks, in partnership with We Are Social, a communication consulting agency born from the era of the social Web, we are seeing a deceleration in digital growth compared to the impressive increases that have observed during the Covid-19 pandemic. This slowdown is inevitable given that the majority of the world’s population is now online. Now, connected technology is fully integrated into the lives of most people around the world, and with it, social media. This is why user growth rates are gradually being pushed into the background. The key question is why they use these technologies.
Social networks: a new way to follow the news
Social networks – which are used by 93.6% of Internet users – are used for many reasons. According to the July 2022 digital report, 47.6% of users use social networks to stay in touch with family or friends, 34.8% to get news and 22.5% to professional reasons. In the end, they are the third source of information for the population: 82% get information through online channels, 61% who watch television and 57% follow the news through social networks. Among the social networks used to get information, Facebook comes first with 44% of users, followed by Youtube with 30% and Whatsapp with 22%. However, TikTok is not to be outdone as the number of respondents saying they use the Chinese platform for news has almost doubled since last year. It goes from 4% in the 2021 digital report to 7% in this year’s study.
This trend affects young adults more than the older generation: almost two-thirds of respondents aged 18-24 said they use social media as a source of information, compared to less than half of respondents aged 55 and over. . However, this is not the main activity of the youngest. Indeed, reading the news is not the main reason why they open the social media apps, but once there, they interact with the news content. Paradoxically, while older age groups use social media less for news, news is actually a more important driver of social media activity.
TikTok: exponential growth
TikTok continues to gain new users at an impressive rate. If the social network with the most active users in the world remains Facebook, with 2.9 billion people, followed by Youtube with 2.4 billion, Tiktok is still in sixth place with 1 billion users. Its global advertising reach has also increased by 52 million – or 5.4% – in the past three months alone. This means TikTok is gaining over half a million new users every day.
It should also be noted that the time users spend on TikTok continues to grow rapidly, while the time users spend on YouTube – at the app level – has actually slightly decreased over the past few months. Hootsuite reports that users spent an average of 19.6 hours per month using TikTok’s Android app during 2021 – with a 20% increase in the first quarter compared to 2021 – compared to 23, 7 hours per month for users of YouTube’s Android app – down just over 2% for the same period.
Is Facebook really dying?
Lately, Facebook seems to be going through a bad patch. Indeed, Meta announced at the end of July that it had generated a turnover of 28.8 billion dollars, a decrease of 1% compared to that of the previous year. A first in its history! However, according to the July 2022 digital report, the global reach of Facebook ads actually increased by 1.2% between April and June, bringing the platform’s total global ad audience to 2.17 billion. In addition, there are certain factors that should not be forgotten to be taken into account.
First, we must not forget that the group’s various applications – namely Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp – are formally prohibited in China, which deprives them of a huge potential audience – which therefore falls back on TikTok. Also, while Facebook’s recent growth rates are nowhere near as impressive as those of TikTok – whose advertising audience has grown more than four times faster than Facebook’s audience over the past three months – one must put the numbers in context. Facebook is a much older social network than TikTok, and has therefore been able to establish itself durably with users all over the world – except for China. As a result, its growth has stabilized, unlike TikTok which is taking off.
The second point to consider is that, now, most global users now use both Facebook and TikTok, as well as many other social networks – it can be noted that Telegram and Snapchat have also seen their user numbers strongly increase. On average, a “typical” Internet user uses 7.5 social networks per month – a figure that varies according to their gender and age. However, it is undeniable that the role of Facebook in the lives of teenagers has diminished considerably compared to the early 2010s. According to the digital report, the platform is now only the fifth largest social media platform ” favourites” of women aged 16 to 24 – although Instagram is still well in the lead – while TikTok is third. In contrast, Facebook fares better among men in this age bracket, although it still ranks below Instagram and WhatsApp. However, Facebook remains the “preferred” choice for millennial men, just ahead of WhatsApp. Suffice to say that the race remains tight and that things will continue to evolve, especially since Meta is making big changes to its various social networks.