Check out our roundup of the latest social media statistics for the UK.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, top of the social media charts is Facebook with 79% of surveyed UK adults using the platform. However, the social giant now shares its podium position with YouTube, who also boasts a 79% usership.
Social media giant, Facebook
Like many of us, you’d be forgiven for thinking Facebook has pretty much saturated the market but, according to figures from the advertising audience tool, this isn’t the case at all. Numbers suggest their total UK user base has risen over the last few years to a truly impressive 39 million. Imagine what 39 million potential customers could do for your business!
This is indeed an interesting statistic for Facebook considering the recent privacy scandals and declining public perception, but time will tell if this social media player can continue to grow. According to the research by We Are Flint, younger users are the most active (93% of 25-34-year olds and 92% of 18-24 year olds), especially when compared to the older generations whose usage is significantly lower (52% for 75+ and 61% for 65-75 year olds). This could suggest that as time goes on, the older, less active generation will be replaced by younger generations who are always connected, thereby growing Facebook’s audience even further.
Twitter user numbers remain static
With a usership of 47%, Twitter, though perhaps somewhat behind its closest rivals, takes second place as the UK’s most popular social media site. Unlike its biggest competitor, Twitter seems to be experiencing a lull in user growth with a fairly static 13.7 million users reported by Statista, similar to numbers seen in previous years. The reason for this could perhaps lie in Twitter users’ more political agenda and the ever-present threat of ‘fake news’, which can cause tempers to run high and morals to run low, resulting in negative user experience. However, Twitter has now made it easier to report inappropriate behaviour so as time goes on, it will be interesting to see if this affects overall user numbers.
Again, the majority of Twitter’s audience are from the younger generations, with 62% of users aged between 18-24 and 69% aged between 25-34. Significantly, Twitter seems to be a young person’s platform as its usage drops off excessively from the 55-64 age group. Indeed, the 35% of 55-64 year olds using the site seems quite high when you realise just 22% of 65-75 and 11% of the 75+ age groups use Twitter.
Instagram - the rising social media star
With 23 million UK users a month, Instagram is well above Twitter in terms of usage rankings, not altogether surprising considering its rapid growth over the last few years. One of the reasons attributed to this rapid rise to stardom is the introduction of the shopping feature, great news for users and marketers alike. This feature does have its drawbacks though, such as country restrictions and having to upload inventory to the Facebook catalogue.
Instagram is much more popular among women than men and, of course, the majority of its users are in the 15-34 age groups. While the budding platform boasts more monthly users than Twitter, according to We Are Flint’s survey, only 41% of the UK adults who participated said they used Instagram, compared to Twitter's 47%.
Deceptive LinkedIn social stats
The UK’s second biggest platform according to monthly user statistics, LinkedIn reports 25 million people on its UK network. However impressive this registered user number is, it’s important to remember LinkedIn suffers from a huge number of inactive users – industry insiders estimate this is anything between 75% - 90%.
This means that while LinkedIn have taken pains to update their advertising system in the last year so that it looks more like Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, only 10% - 25% of their users are actually seeing them.
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