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New Social Study Produces Eye-Opening Insights
The folks over at GoodFirms recently published their latest 2019 social media usage report.
As usual, it brought to light a series of fascinating findings of relevance to large and small businesses alike.
Consulting with 450 social media users across more than 10 countries, GoodFirms sets out to establish the general public’s social media usage habits as they stand today.
Active, moderately active and less active users were selected from a variety of backgrounds, in order to produce objective results.
Key Findings
Of all the insights brought to light when the data was collated, the most interesting was the perception of value among social media users. Incredibly, no less than 96% of those included in the study stated that social media has a positive impact on their life.
What’s more, almost every respondent stated that they use a minimum of four or more platforms on a daily basis. A full 99% of respondents confirmed their daily activities on at least four social platforms - the most popular of which were the usual suspects:
- YouTube
- Messenger
Messenger was considered a separate social network in its own right, given how it can be accessed using its own dedicated app.
Additionally, the fact that LinkedIn outperformed Facebook suggests that most of those taking part in the survey were professionals.
Additional Findings
Along with the above insights on the perceived value of social media and the cross-platform usage habits of audiences worldwide, the GoodFirms survey confirmed the following:
- Visual content continues to outperform all other types of content. Personal videos, photos and memes in particular had the highest publishing and engagement rates on social media.
- Content that’s designed to disappear after a brief period - aka ‘perishable content’ - continues to grow in popularity. Two examples of which being WhatsApp status updates and Snaps.
- Practically every social media user regularly encounters untargeted and irrelevant ads, though two-thirds of these users ignore such ads entirely.
- Alarmingly, approximately 85% of all social media users have experienced trolling or bullying of some kind. The vast majority of whom have chosen not to report such incidents or activities.
- Approximately the same number of users (86%) have never closed their accounts and left any social networks to date. Most prefer to allow inactive accounts to lie dormant, rather than closing them down entirely.
Right at the opposite end of the scale, the survey also detailed the least popular social networks among those taking part in the survey:
- Snapchat
Again, this may be more a case of a disproportionate number of professionals and users within slightly older demographics having taken part in the survey.
The Takeaway…
Drawing conclusions from the survey, evidence suggests that a cross-platform social strategy is advisable for an increasingly cross-platform social audience. Likewise, with 99% of respondents stating that their lives are improved in some way by social media, the phenomenon as a whole isn’t going anywhere for the near future at least.