Social media use in numbers

According to a report by Our World in Data (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019), 3,5 billion people out of the 7,7 billion use online services like the internet – nearly half of the human population. The amount of people using social media platforms has risen steadily over the past decade – as seen in Figure 4 below, in 2010 there were less than a billion social media users in the world. By the end of 2020 the number is estimated to nearly triple to 2,96 billion (Statista, 2020a), meaning that one third of the world’s population and two thirds of all internet users across the globe will use social media.

FIGURE 4. Number of social media users worldwide from 2010 to 2021. Adapted from

Statista, 2020, retrieved March 1, 2020 from

https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/

Copyright 2020 by Statista

Of the existing social networking sites, Facebook and Instagram are of special interest for the purpose of this thesis, as explained in chapter 1. As of January 2020, Facebook had over 2,4 billion users worldwide, while Instagram has roughly one billion users, as seen in Figure 5 on the next page.

FIGURE 5. Social media platforms with most active users worldwide as of January 2020.

Adapted from Statista, 2020, retrieved March 1, 2020 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ Copyright 2020 by Statista

While various online communities existed before social media, the first platform to reach a million monthly users was Myspace in 2004 (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). Since then the platform has been dwarfed by giants like Facebook, which as of Q1 of 2020 boasts a monthly userbase of 2,6 billion worldwide (Statista, 2020b), while the latest data available for Myspace estimated its monthly userbase to be only 7,55 million users in in February 2019 (Statista, 2020c). While many of the major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have existed for over ten years, some of the largest platforms today such as Snapchat and TikTok have emerged much more recently (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). Some of the new social media platforms also gain users in an astonishing speed; TikTok launched in late 2016 in China and by April 2020 already had 800 million users worldwide (Kemp, 2020).

But the exponential rise of the likes of TikTok is not unique, as the social networking site landscape has shown to be volatile in the past. Platforms like Hi5, Friendster and Myspace were real competitors to the likes of Facebook in mid-2000s, but in the scope of just four years from 2008 to 2012 the formerly mentioned platforms had lost practically all of their market share. (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019).

Furthermore, in the United States 73 % of social media users aged 18-24 use Snapchat, while only 9 % of users aged 50-64 use said platform. Instagram is used by 75 % of users aged 18-24, when the number for users in the 50-64 age bracket is just 23 %. Facebook and YouTube are on average (73 % and 69 % respectively) used by the majority of all social media users, regardless of age. While the adoption of social media has increased in the past decade, the use of social media

is much more frequent for young people. The difference in the “gradient” or the degree of heterogeneity between age groups varies significantly between different social media platforms. While the difference in the use of Facebook between 18-24 and 25-29-year-olds is just 8 %, with Snapchat in the same age bracket the change is already 26 %, showing an even larger gap between users 30 and older. (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019.)

Gender is another factor that should be taken to consideration when marketing to a specific audience. While some platforms are used by both men and women proportionally, like WhatsApp, others like Pinterest and Instagram are more popular with the other gender (41 % of women use Instagram, as opposed to 31 % of men, and 42 % of women use Pinterest, as opposed to just 15

% of men). There are some differences between genders even on the major platforms like Facebook (75 % of women use Facebook compared to 63 % of men) and YouTube (78 % of men use YouTube compared to 68 % of men). Age and sex-related trends and differences vary from platform to platform and they are likely to evolve as existing platforms mature and new ones emerge. (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019.)

Next, the change that might be most visible is in the types of mobile applications that have emerged in the past years, such as TikTok and Snapchat.

Digital media like social media sites are being accessed increasingly through mobile devices like smart phones and tablets (Figure 6 on the next page). In the U.S. just 11 % (0,3 hours out of 2,7 hours) of the total time spent on digital media was on mobile devices in 2008, when in 2018 it was already 57 % (out of total 6,3 hours per day). Not only is mobile today the main device-type for consuming digital media, but the daily amount of time spent engaging with digital media has increased significantly by 133 %. This means that many consumers are more likely to be reached through digital media than traditional medium such as newspapers, radio or even TV. As mentioned earlier, the transition to mobile can be seen in the types of applications many younger users have adopted, such as TikTok and Snapchat which exist exclusively on mobile devices. Older platforms like Instagram can be browsed on a computer, but the experience is greatly reduced, and it is possible to create content only through a smart device. (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019.)

FIGURE 6. Daily hours spent with digital media 2008-2018 (U.S.). Adapted from Our World in Data by E. Ortiz-Ospina, 2019, retrieved January 18, 2020 from https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media Copyright 2019 by Our World in Data

Finally, the amount of time spent on social media appears to be much higher in wealthy countries. According to the report this is partially explained by a nearly universal access to the internet, which is especially apparent in countries like the U.S., the U.K. and the Nordic countries. For example, in 2014 in Sweden 96 % of young people aged 16-24 reportedly use social media frequently. Ortiz-Ospina, 2019.)

Literature on social media usage in political marketing mostly focuses on the U.S. market. Use of social media networks can vary from country to country and a social media marketing strategy for a specific target audience may not be effective elsewhere by default. This thesis looks at the use of social media from the perspective of political marketing, which in the case of national politics narrows down the potential audience. Depending on the candidate, the party and the policy the audience can vary by region, country, city and even by district. As the political campaign in the case study for this thesis took place in Finland, the next sub-chapter discusses use of social media in Finland.