Whether you’re living in remote Africa or a swanky pad in the Hollywood Hills, social media has almost certainly affected your life. Some of us use it literally to socialize, others adopt it as a tool for political activism, while corporations have yet another marketing tool at their fingertips.
It’s an all encompassing mode of communication, and whereas one era had the written letter and another the telephone, today social media seems to be our go to means of non-verbal expression.
This was demonstrated clearly in August 2015, when on Monday 24th, 14% of the world’s population (roughly 1 in 7 people) logged on to Facebook.
Of course that astonishing figure was just one day, the amount of people who use Facebook in one week or month is even greater. In fact in the United States data suggests that upwards of 70% of adults with internet access use some form of social media.
We’re still in the early stages of understanding what this all means however. Is face to face contact doomed? Are journalists going to be redundant now that anyone at the scene of a story can tweet or even live stream the news over social media? What the future holds is anyone’s guess, but the rise of medium is still nowhere near its peak.
The Social Media in Real Time counter is a fun little tool that helps us see just how active the world is on platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Google Plus, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, and LinkedIn.
When you load up the page you are greeted with a clock and with every second that ticks by, all the key metrics from each social site go up accordingly based on the latest statistical averages. If you ever wanted to know how many photos get uploaded to Instagram in 7 minutes, now you can!
The answer is 388,920 by the way. Then there are the 420,000 comments, and a whopping 17 million likes. Yes the primary activity on the photo sharing site is people looking at and liking photos. For those that upload them, that has to be a nice ego boost.
Then there’s Facebook. In just 10 seconds 48,830 people decided to update the world on their current thoughts. 8,330 of those were links to other sites. The second most popular activity in those few seconds was uploading photos, to the tune of 22,670. And there were 16,670 friend requests. For the sake of happiness, we hope they all accepted.
Of course it’s celebrities that drive a huge chunk of social media activity. When the average active Twitter user only has a few hundred followers and Katy Perry has over 78.2 million, it’s easy to see why. In 7 minutes we observed that she gained another 189 more.
Music is also obviously a big part of YouTube now that music videos are legally uploaded. In the same timeframe Adele’s new single Hello garnered 97,020 more views, this added to an already incredible 548 million!
With such reach one wonders what impact celebs are having on society. We know a lot of accounts are managed by PR firms and managers, but even if it’s an illusion, we’ve never been in such direct contact. In fact we’ve never been so closely connected to so many people from all over the world.
While the end game is not clear, it’s fascinating to see the exponential growth of social media before you very own eyes.
Check out the graphic below, which gives you a sense of the kind of data that can be and is collected about social media in real time. To see the actual numbers add up in real time, click here.
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Methodology
The data used on this page was fetched from sources around the web referenced in above link. Some statistics are based on a yearly reported data and are thus averaged down to per second basis and do not represent actual real time data but rather very accurate approximation of real time growth.