[Webinar] Understanding Social Media Demographics

Understanding the statistical data of your social media audience plays a significant part in any social media strategy. Each platform has the potential to reach a set of people it is made for. The understanding of these statistics is essential to tweak the online marketing strategy and reach the right set of people with relevant and most appropriate content.

A good marketing strategy with demographic analysis has proven effective for every social media marketer. Even if you are a newbie, understanding the type of audience will help you define the most useful platforms for your brand. In other words, you have to determine which platforms make the most sense for your brand to utilize them to the core and which platform is made for what type of content.

For any basic marketing campaign to succeed, not just for online or social media marketing, STP (Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning) proves to be the most fundamental framework that is practiced by marketers all around. STP will help you deliver tailored and most relevant content to your targeted audience. Instead of spending time creating content for a platform where your audience doesn't have a significant presence, a good thoughtful marketing effort on the right platform will fetch you more results. This strategy will also commercially attract the audience, which will be interested in your product or service.

More profound audience research and filtered customer targeting always lead to a more productive and successful marketing campaign, which eventually leads to better online engagement. After understanding the importance of social media demographics, firstly, we will have an overview of global statistics and then discuss the minute details. Let's dive in!

World population is more than 7.6 billion with a sex ratio of 50.5% males and 49.5% females. So we can say there is almost equal distribution in terms of the two genders. The age distribution is as follows:

Now let us get to internet statistics. Close to 57% of the world population uses the internet, which makes it 4.3 billion in numbers! Here, the statistics are according to any individual who accessed the internet from any remote location in the last three months via a computer, mobile device, personal digital assistant, gaming machine, smart TV, etc. Northern-Western Europe and North America have the most considerable internet penetration, with more than 90% internet users, compared to the total population. A recent study has revealed that an internet user on an average spends 6 hrs and 42 mins a day on the internet.

Let us get more precise and talk about social media user statistics. Social media penetration currently stands at 45% of the total world's population, which means there are roughly 3.4 billion social media users worldwide. In these statistics, Saudi Arabia is on the top position as its 99% of the population uses the internet whereas Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria are at the lowest level as less than 15% of their population uses the internet. As we discussed earlier that an average internet user spends 6 hrs and 42 minutes on the internet while an average social media user spends 2 hours a day on social media platforms.

In terms of commercial use, 91% of retail brands use 2-3 social media platforms for their promotion and sales, whereas other small and medium businesses prefer to use more than three platforms for the same purpose.

Here, we’ll focus on mainly four platforms that are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Firstly, we must recall the purpose of each platform. So let's get to it!

1. Facebook is the highest and the oldest platform in this business of online social networking among the four platforms. You can use it for personal or commercial purpose. It does not really have a specific purpose or audience to target as it serves almost every purpose of social media and social networking.

2. Instagram is a mobile social network that allows users to edit and share photos as well as videos. Due to the app’s visual nature and high user engagement rate, Instagram is also one of the most valuable social media marketing tools.

3. Twitter has become an increasingly relevant tool in domestic and international politics. It helps to promote policies and interact with citizens and other officials. Moreover, most of the world leaders and foreign ministries have an official Twitter account. It majorly enables registered users to read and post short messages called tweets. It continues to maintain its status as one of the most popular social media platforms.

4. LinkedIn is an exclusive social media platform because of it’s concrete user base as compared to other social media platforms. Its user base consists of mostly educated and affluent people who are already in a professional headspace and actively looking for solutions. So if your brand is yearning for a calm, focused alternative to the oversaturation and bitterness of 2019’s social media landscape, then LinkedIn gets even more attractive!

That said, let us analyze the deeper statistics of social media platforms and make it easy to compare the suitability for your brand.

Points Of Comparison:

• Monthly Active Users
• Active Users According To Countries
• Distribution By Gender
• Average Time Spent

Monthly Active Users

We can see below that Facebook has topped the chart of monthly active users and thus has a market share of a whopping 67% in the social media world. While Instagram has a meager 29% of the market share, Twitter and LinkedIn have an almost similar market share of 9%.

Please note, this should not be confused with exclusive market shares because there are users with multiple accounts around social media. Therefore such users will be part of market shares of various social media platforms.

Active Users According To Countries

Different platforms are popular in different countries. So here are the statistics about which platform is to be used to cater to your target audience.

Distribution By Gender

From the below-mentioned statistics, you can quickly figure out which platform to target for your brand based on gender. For example, if your business is related to women clothing, Instagram is the right platform for you.

If we go a step further and analyze different age groups in terms of their Facebook presence, we can say that 10% of global active Facebook users are women between the ages of 18 and 24 years, and male users between the ages of 25 and 34 years constituted the most significant demographic group of Facebook users.

Whereas 15% of global active Instagram users are women between the ages of 18 and 24 years. More than half of the global Instagram population worldwide is aged 34 years or younger.

If we look at the age distribution for Twitter, it provides contrasting results as compared to Instagram and Facebook, the majority of users are 25 years and above with 31% of global Twitter users, aged between 25 and 34 years, which means Twitter isn’t very popular among teenagers, unlike Instagram.

LinkedIn being a platform for professional networking, is most famous amongst people pursuing their career between the age group of 25 to 55 years.

Average Time Spent

It really makes a difference if we know how beneficial is the platform that we are working on. If we know our audience is spending more time on platform A instead of B, then it's time to switch. Given below are the statistics to solve this dilemma.

Conclusion

We hope you are equipped with the required resources for understanding social media demographics for selecting the best suited social media platform for your business. You can now have a great ROI with a quality target audience with proper understanding of what social media platform is most suitable for you.

Takeaways:

1. Strategies to grow business on social media
2. Social media marketing strategies to boost engagement
3. Grow your startup with social media marketing strategy

You can draw similar inferences and observe statistical data specific to your social media accounts by connecting them to Statusbrew to take advantage of the powerful reporting feature. Observe and analyze social media demographic insights for your data to know your progress report and use it later in your marketing strategy. Here's where you can start your 7 day free trial right away!

Please feel free to comment and share your views on any other demographic requirements for devising a strong social media strategy that works for you!