An illustration of how we work the Internet in our daily lives.
IT has been estimated that slightly more than 60 per cent of people around the world are now using some sort of social media platform or app for leisure, business, information and research.
For a majority of businesses, this in effect means that it is now possible for the very first time in the history of mankind to reach nearly any type of consumer on any of these platforms – even in the most remote places hitherto unreachable, so long as they have Internet service.
This means that the more popular platforms would be worth their weight in gold, especially those with a great many active users and in the targeted segment of the prime age groups and income levels. They should also have the reach and accessibility desired by global corporations when it comes to promoting their products and services.
Here’s a short list of who the main players are right now and the handful who hold the keys to the kingdom of social media as we know it today.
At the top of the heap is Facebook, probably the most recognisable social media platform in the world today. It had 2.912 billion monthly active users as at January 2022, translating to 36.8 per cent of the world’s population. In reality, the figure is higher as currently Facebook restricts membership to the above 13-year-olds.
Facebook was founded on Feb 4, 2004, making it only 18 years old (its coming of age!).
Its success has been consistent as it has evolved through the years to adapt to the needs of its users, and is able to attract newcomers as well. It has also consolidated its success by having acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp in recent memory. The WhatsApp messaging platform has been a runaway success throughout the known world and with its estimated two billion users, is only third after Facebook and YouTube as a social media force.
Twitter was launched in 2006 and as at February 2022, had roughly 217 million active users.
It is very popular mostly in the US and certain parts of Europe.
Notoriously, former US president Donald Trump had used it on a daily basis to make known his personal views and opinions, and had actually abused it to his own personal advantage many times to tweet falsities and half-truths.
It is a useful site for interaction via chats, especially in certain close-knit industries or in responding to customers who have customer service queries. It was initially restricted to only 140 characters per Tweet, but it has since raised that limit and now allows users to share photos and videos as well.
However, Twitter does not have a strong presence in most parts of Asia and the Pacific Rim, and is considered to be a niche tool in Malaysia and most Asean nations. Currently it has yet to command a big following here.
LinkedIn is the most popular social media for networking purposes by professionals – it has over 810 million registered users, with 310 million classified as active monthly users. Launched in 2003, it allows its users to add in their resumes and working experience, and to connect with others in similar industries, and even to post and respond to job listings. In a marketing sense, LinkedIn is especially useful for B2B businesses and is a huge success with networking between similar level entrepreneurs and business people.
Next comes YouTube, which is undoubtedly the world’s most popular and ultra-successful video-sharing website today. It is also the second most popular search engine after Google itself. The company was founded in 2005 and was, eventually, bought over by Google.
YouTube has over two billion logged-in visitors per month, with 43 percent of all global Internet users logged in each month without fail. It is most popular among users aged 15 to 35 and women outnumber men as viewers. It translates to an advertising revenue for them of over US$7 billion for every quarter. More than a billion hours of content is viewed on YouTube every single day.
Instagram, which is now part of the Facebook empire, was launched in 2010. It has a heavy emphasis on visuals – many of its contents and posts are simply photographs, illustrations and graphics with almost no text involved or present. It has more than a billion users monthly and is most popular as a mobile platform.
Then would come the rest, many of which are not as well known, and even has much lesser number of users, especially in this part of the world – Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr, Reddit, Snapchat, Quora, Vimeo, WeChat, and others.
The latest sensation among social media users is TikTok, which is now available in over 150 countries and has over one billion users. It has been downloaded over 200 million times in the US alone! If your brand’s target audience is anyone between the ages of 13 and 60, you should be on TikTok right now!
TikTok is a ‘Johnny-come-lately’; only being launched outside of Mainland China in 2018 (it was famously featured in a brief scene at the Oscars ceremony that year). It was known as ‘Douyin’ in China and is owned by ByteDance Ltd, a Chinese company – hosting short-form user-produced video clips with duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. Industry statistician Cloudflare had even ranked TikTok as the most popular website of 2021, thus overshadowing the previous #1 – Google!
Internet users are spoilt for choice when it comes to social media platforms right now.
Ten years ago, they only had Facebook and Google to occupy their time and as a social media to share their thoughts, stories, vacation and family photographs.
Today that presence has been multiplied at least four-fold – if you count in WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
The WhatsApp social chatgroups; by Facebook and Instagram posts, and especially by YouTube video-clips (self-produced amateur instructions on how-to videos, from cookery lessons to gardening to DIY carpentry and what-have-you) have exploded in a thousand and one ways – it’s not far from the truth that if you could think of it, and if you could search for it, it’s highly likely that there’s a video-clip for it!
I can only imagine what else lies ahead in the foreseeable future!
God only knows!
Let’s pray that whatever comes next would be more beneficial, and not detrimental, to mankind at large! Amen.