Posted by: ClickZ
Posted on: 5/27/2019
GoodFirms, a review website that provides insight about marketing software and vendors, released their social media usage report for 2019 in May. The report is based on a survey of over 450 global social media users classified as highly active, moderate, and less active users.
Participants were gathered from more than ten countries, with the breakdown as follows
Topics the survey covered
- Social media platforms people use
- The typical content they interact with and post on their respective accounts
- How they manage irrelevant ads, and other nuisances like trolls
Key findings
The survey provided many useful insights into how people engage with social media including its sheer ubiquity. Nearly all the respondents, a full 96%, believe that social media positively impacts their lives.
Additionally, 99% of respondents indicated that they use four or more platforms a day. The top platforms listed were:
- YouTube
- Messenger (Though this one can arguably be viewed as a messaging platform versus a social media platform as you can access it via a separate app.)
Here are some other interesting findings of the GoodFirms survey
- Visual content rules. Personal photos, videos, and memes are the most engaged and posted content type on social media.
- “Perishable” posts (the kind of content that disappears after a certain period of time) have gained popularity. This includes content like Snaps, Instagram stories, and WhatsApp status updates.
- Nearly all the respondents come across irrelevant ads, but about 67% choose to ignore them.
- About 85% of people have experienced some form of social media trolling.
- Most of the respondents, 86%, have not left any social media platforms (yet).
- Understanding the habits of social media users can help inform your social media strategy.
It should be noted that since LinkedIn is the top social media platform in this survey (even above Facebook and YouTube), it is likely that most of the people surveyed are professionals, thus this may skew the results a bit when compared to the general population. Heavy users tend to lean more towards LinkedIn and Facebook, while moderate users prefer Facebook and YouTube.
The least popular platforms in this survey were
- Snapchat
This may also be a factor of the audience that was surveyed. Here is the complete breakdown of the results that show platform popularity based on user frequency.
The GoodFirms survey also looked at the type of content people prefer, and it’s not surprising that sharing visual content including photos, videos, and memes were preferred. Text messages was the second most popular content type, with 70% of respondents indicating they prefer text messages on social media (I would argue that text messages aren’t really in the same category of content as, say, a photo or a video, but it’s still good to have an understanding of how people are using social to communicate).
Here is the breakdown of top content types
The GoodFirms survey was conducted with the intention of helping companies better plan their social media marketing strategy. The complete results (including a lot of great stats and graphs) are available on their website.
Jacqueline Dooley is the Director of Digital Strategy at CommonMind.
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