Social media: What do the numbers mean?

The world has never been connected like now where information travels at terribly awful speed.
At the fold of the 90s the world cruised into a new social order, edging into real time innovations that have given the global village tagline its true meaning.
One of the innovations – social media connects more than 2.5 billion people in one go with an estimated daily engagement of 1.5 billion people.
The numbers are real and give the world a new meaning with capacity to guarantee a redefined society that is connected in every fabric.
But how does these numbers stand and what do they mean to global connectivity?

Facebook
With a total user subscription larger than the size of Africa, Facebook is the most popular social site connecting more people than ever before.
In its results released recently, Facebook has grown to more than 1.55 billion subscribers with a daily engagement of more than a billion people spread across the globe.
The engagement, analysts says, is the largest ever social gathering that not only has the capacity to influence political directions but offers new meaning to business and entrepreneurship.

WhatsApp
It has grown so rapidly and has in less than five years, accumulated more than 900 million users.
The mostly mobile phone powered service has given short text messaging a new meaning rendering traditional forms of messaging almost redundant.
It is the new era that defines the millenniums and gives hope to the highly disoriented Africa business and innovations perspective. It is deemed as the most relative user friendly communication platform that is ideal for social and business communication.

Twitter
Twitter is a micro blogging site with more than 880 million subscribers, according to Twopcharts, the company that for many years has been tracking the platform’s registration.
However, the engagement on Twitter is low compared to Facebook as only 7 per cent, which translates to about 230 million of the subscribers, engage in formal debates on a daily basis.
This means that Twitter has a ‘dark pool’ of 650 million accounts, which among others, include subscribers that visit the site but never engage in debate and those that have abandoned their accounts.

Instagram
Initially, Instagram had phased through a period of slowed growth but has since its acquisition by Facebook experienced tremendous growth, growing to more than 400 million users in less than five years.
The site, which allows high value sharing of pictures, infographics and data has, according to statistics had an affluent growth in terms of business growth registering more than 45 million small and medium businesses-related user groups.
Most of these groups, data shows, are related to fashion, photography and entertainment blogs, among others.
This, analysts say, gives the world a new meaning where small business entrepreneurship can exhibit in real time and in an organised manner.

What do the numbers mean?
But amid all this growth the challenge is how users shall be able to transform the connectivity into an opportunity that can ably drive their income as well as growing their business.
The growth, data shows, is yet to transform into real income with less than 17 per cent of subscribers using such sites for business or entreprenueral connectivity.
More than 48 per cent of subscribers have never used any social media site for business connected communication, which is telling how much of the exchange could be leisure or social.
However, trends show there has been some growth with business related communication growing from 8 per cent in 2013 to the current 17 per cent.

Youtube

YouTube, which is largely a video sharing website, was founded in 2005. Currently, according to Google Adplanner the site attracts more than a billion unique users on a daily basis.