The Covid-19 pandemic has had an accelerating effect on the digitization of the world. This is the observation that can be drawn from reading the new report by Hootsuite and We are social, published this week. More than 4.7 billion people around the world now use the internet, i.e. 332 million more users compared to 2020 (+ 7.6%). “This strong growth suggests an increase of more than 900,000 users per day or 10.5 new Internet users per second.
More than 92% of Internet users in the world access the Internet via their mobile and spend an average of 6.56 hours on the Internet “, explains the report which underlines the importance of social networks for Internet users.” One of the big surprises of this quarter is found in the adoption of social media which continues to grow despite an already very high growth rate since the Covid-19 epidemic. Over 500 million people around the world have joined social media platforms in the past 12 months, which is an annual increase of 14%. ”
It is true that the various platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube have well integrated this craze, in particular to learn about the epidemic. To counter the still too many fake news, all of them have put in place mechanisms to guide their members towards reliable information. “The number of social media users worldwide reaches 4.33 billion, which is equivalent to more than 55% of the total world population. The latter figure is 2% higher than in the first quarter of 2021. The number of social media ‘social media users have therefore grown twice as fast in the last three months of the year “, calculates the report which introduces my notion of” favorite social network “.
WhatsApp preferred platform in the world
Unsurprisingly, this is WhatsApp, Facebook’s messenger. “Globally (excluding China), nearly a quarter (24.1%) of internet users aged 16 to 64 say WhatsApp is their favorite social media platform,” the report said. A percentage that ultimately did not suffer too much from the controversy over the new general conditions of use of WhastApp which had made users flee to Telegram or Signal. “Facebook comes in second with almost 22% while Instagram is in third place with 18.4%. Facebook’s four platforms (WhatsApp, Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram) account for more than two-thirds (67.9% ) favorite social platforms in the world, ”the report notes. Data that will comfort the supporters of a dismantling of the Facebook empire. Twitter is in fourth position.
“49.3% of respondents say the main motivation for using social media is to“ stay in touch with friends and family. ”However, it is interesting to note that more than one in three users say that news and entertainment have become new motivations, ”says Hootsuite.
Finally, each age has its own network: women aged 16 to 34 and men aged 16 to 24 prefer Instagram, men aged 25 to 34 prefer Facebook and all those aged 35 to 64 prefer WhatsApp.
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