Last week, we told you about midwestern women who loved using Pinterest. While that particular study dealt with domestic social media platforms, we now have a better idea of global usage. Facebook is still king, and their other platform, Instagram, is the fastest growing.
The study, connected by Global Web Index, sampled answers from 170,000 users across 32 countries. Their data shows that Facebook is far and away the most used, and has many more total accounts than anyone else. Second is a close tie between Google+ and YouTube, though those numbers are a bit skewed. Their active user versus overall account ratio is one of the worst, and both statistics can be related to Google’s insistence that all their properties be tied together.
Twitter is technically fourth on the list, having nearly as many active users as the Google+/YouTube combo, with LinkedIn rounding out the top 5. Oddly, when you look a little further down the chart, it seems as though the nearly defunct Orkut has more users that Reddit. Both Pinterest and Instagram have healthy showings as well.
In terms of growth of active use, Instagram blew everyone else away. They almost doubled Reddit’s 13%, coming in at 23% for usage increase. LinkedIn came in third with 9%, and Tencent Weibo was a surprise fourth. That can be attributed to it’s use in countries that don’t allow things like Facebook, though. Ohers like Pinterest or Google+ had moderate growth at around 6%, with YouTube and Facebook usage dropping off slightly.
When it comes to accessing those sites, mobile now has a slight edge. Roughly 66% f users say they use a smartphone to access social media sites, while PC and tablets are at 64% and 65%, respectively. When it comes to microblogging sites like Twitter, tablets are king. When we’re tweeting, it seems that 44% of us use a tablet, while only 29% use a smartphone.
VIA: Tech Crunch
