Social Media Stats: 5 Year Review

Before planning any social media strategy it is important to understand the current landscape of each of the channels. Much like trying to pick a winning stock for your portfolio, once you have narrowed down your choices it is wise to look at a 5 year chart of that stock to see the historical context. If it is rising, why is it rising, is it rising more than the overall stock market and will it continue. If it is declining, is it declining at the same pace as the stock market and what is the reason for the change to make it rise (unless you are shorting stocks). No one would blindly pick a stock without looking at the track record.

The same applies to social media channels. It is important to see where they are in a historical perspective. Importantly you also need a gauge much like the use of the stock market in the picking of stocks noted above. The gauge we suggest is the number of new social media users. Once you have this figure, you will know that if the growth in a given social media channel is lower than this figure, then the channel is growing at a slower rate as the number of new users, or said another way the new users are choosing other channels over this one. Should the growth rate in a channel be greater than the rate of new users then it is attracting more than the new users, thus from other channels.

So what does the data tell us in our 5 Year Review?

The total number of new social media users has risen 49% - this is our gauge. Looking at the numbers, both Facebook (34%) and YouTube (32%) are in decline. Yes they have grown but not at the rate of new users. So new users are gravitating to other channels, meaning we should have some channels well above the 49% mark, which we do. TikTok is the leader at 128% which is a factor of 2.6 times the gauge, meaning they are attracting an additional 2.6 times more users on top of all the new users on social media which more than makes up for the declines at Facebook and YouTube.

We don't know what channels will be favoured by users going forward, but what we do know is that there is some significant outperformance by Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok over the past 5 years. Making and dedicating your social media strategies in 2024 to one of these 3 channels would be a wise decision.

I discuss this in more detail on my podcast Digital Marketing Mindset, you can listen to it here: https://www.poggionegroup.com/social-media-statistics-to-build-your-2024-strategy-campaigns/

Wishing you much success and profitability in your business.