Growth of Social Media in Real Time [Interactive Infographic]

This is a guest contribution by Zuzana Padychova. She is a “glocal” marketer, helping international SMEs to adapt and execute their global business strategies in local markets. Her focus is on digital marketing communication and trade shows. She has worked with teams from 27 countries over 5 continents and coordinated a participation of companies in 30+ trade shows in 10 countries. She is on a team of digital marketers developing a network of Coupofy online startups.

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Looking beyond the internet and mobile devices themselves, no other invention has progressed communication further than social media. Its ease of use and widespread appeal has brought people from all over the world together, in a way that was never really anticipated.

One of the biggest social media milestones happened just this summer when 70% of the global population logged in to Facebook in a single 24 hour period. Prior research has already suggested that 74% of all internet enabled adults are social media users. More people are literally tweeting and updating their statuses than dialling their friend’s phone number!

Despite such figures it’s still hard to get your head around the sheer magnitude of social media usage. The following interactive infographic from Coupofy attempts to do just, by displaying data from the top 9 sites in real time. Rather than adding up numbers from the past, the Social Media in Real Time counter aims to illustrate how these platforms are growing at a rapid rate all the time.

Sites featured include –

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Reddit
• Google Plus
• Instagram
• Tumblr
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest

The second you load up the counter all the key indicators begin rising like a stopwatch.

Freezing photo sharing site Instagram’s stats at 6 minutes and 45 seconds revealed that 2,604 new users signed up in that time period. This equated to over 16.4 million Likes, 375,030 new photos shared, and 405,000 comments made. Imagine these numbers in just one hour!

Of course on an individual basis we are more than aware of how many likes we get ourselves. It is one of the negatives of social media, in that we tend to view things as a popularity contest and put undue merit behind how we perceive others judge us. Unsurprisingly it is celebrities that tend to have the largest social media followings, and a few of these were picked for the real time counter.

In the same time period music sensation Katy Perry gained another 182 Twitter followers, soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo counted another 76 fans on Facebook, and Adele’s new single “Hello” got a staggering 93,750 views on Youtube. Upon its upload it was the fastest viewed song in the history of the video sharing site.

The number of people celebrities can reach and the direct nature of this reach raises all sorts of questions about how society might be impacted. And it’s not just celebrities, how has social media as a whole changed or society?

It’s no secret that platforms such as Twitter have directly aided political movements and full blown revolutions across the world. For every argument that social media brings mediocrity and uniformity, there’s another that claims it helps spread positive ideas and awareness for just causes. Bringing people from all over the world together could theoretically allow undeveloped societies to socially progress.

The fact that everyone now has a voice is also changing the way media (especially the news) functions. We don’t need to wait until the evening broadcast to learn what happened at the scene of an event. The people there will likely have tweeted about it before any reporter even has the chance to turn up. This can be both a positive and a negative. Getting information directly from the source avoid spin and rhetoric, yet sometimes insight and analysis from experts helps the average person understand certain types of information.

The rise of social media also brings with it debates about privacy, political correctness and mob mentality, and concern about less face to face communication. But whatever impact it is having (good or bad), there’s no denying that it now plays an integral part in our modern lives.

Check out the Social Media in Real Time counter, to see the growth of the top 9 sites before your very eyes!

Presented by Coupofy

Header Image Courtesy: http://rafiki270.deviantart.com/

Source of article: http://www.adpushup.com/blog/growth-of-social-media-in-real-time/