UK Marketing Social Media Users Reach 5.07 Billion and Top Social Platforms Continue to Attract Billions of Visitors

Key Insights

• Social media users reach 5.07 billion.
• Users are going online "on purpose" and advertisers are looking for new markets.
• Choose a specific platform for your product audience.
• CPM is still the acquisition strategy for most marketers.

Social media users reach 5.07 billion

Smartphones account for nearly four-fifths of the mobile phones in use today. Internet users grew by 3.5% by October 2022, with 171 million new users in the last 12 months bringing global internet penetration to 63.5%. Social media users have grown by 190 million over the past year to reach 4.74 billion by early October 2022, and social media users are now equivalent to 59.3% of the world's total population of users worldwide.

Data from Google Trends also shows that searches for "TikTok" have grown steadily in recent months. more than half of the platform's total active user base. 
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Considering similar trends on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp Web, it is likely that many of these searches are conducted by people who want to use TikTok content from a web browser, rather than people who simply want to learn what TikTok is about, or download the app.

This "social networking" phenomenon is not unique to TikTok, as most of the top social platforms continue to attract billions of visitors to their websites each month, with YouTube having the largest number of visitors to its website, with 5 billion separate devices accessing YouTube in August 2022. 

WhatsApp is also hugely popular, attracting more unique visitors than many of the world's top websites.

Twitter and Instagram's sites also continue to attract over 1 billion visitors per month. Reddit's site also attracts over 1 billion visitors per month, although the platform reports only 50 million daily users, suggesting that many of the platform's visitors are not registered or logged in.

Users are going online "on purpose" and advertisers are looking for new markets

The average amount of time users spend on the internet per day has decreased in recent months around the world, and in internet growth markets such as the Middle East and Latin America. We believe this is mainly due to increased user anxiety and distrust of news caused by social media, especially as social media accounts for an increasing share of overall online time.

In addition, there has been a massive decline in the number of mobile and app advertisers, with the largest declines in Europe and the US, however, in the Middle East, South America, South Asia and other emerging markets there has been a 10% increase in advertisers. Asia Pacific has some of the most engaged mobile gamers, with 70% pre-registering for games and average session lengths exceeding the global average of 30 minutes by as much as four minutes.

Although people's motivations for using the Internet have not changed much since the COVID era, survey results show that users are spending their time online more "selectively" and that people are increasingly concerned about where and how they spend their time online.

So marketers need to be more purposeful in their campaigns and content and actively add value to their audience's online experience.

Particularly on social media, there is a risk of not provoking users with irrelevant content.

Choose a specific platform for your product audience

Facebook remains by far the most widely used social media platform in the world, and it still has hundreds of millions more active users than its next closest competitor.



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The amount of time users spend on Facebook applications increased from an average of 19.4 hours per month in Q1 2022 to an average of 19.7 hours per month in Q2. This shows that Facebook still accounts for over 70% of all web traffic referrals from social media.

Meta remains the main source of paid mobile growth, especially for non-gaming apps. Social platforms follow Instagram and Messenger more closely when it comes to gaming apps.

Marketers are placing twice as many ads on Facebook for adults aged 18 and over as they are on TikTok. Of course, the data for teens may look a little different, as TikTok's tools don't report data for users under 18, so it's hard to be sure.

If your product isn't targeted at teens, then you're better off focusing on your specific audience.

Looking at the broader app market, smartphone users spent a total of $32.4 billion on mobile apps in the last three months, with over 90% of consumer spending on mobile apps going to 1,800 publishers, which represent less than 1% of the 185,000 developers on the Google Play and iOS store.

CPM is still the acquisition strategy for most marketers

Facebook's MAU(Monthly Active User) decreased by 2 million users between April 2022 and June 2022, representing just 0.1% of the global total and well below the 4.1% decline in ad reach reported over the same period.

This is significantly below the potential range reported by the Meta tool a few months ago. Marketers should therefore take a closer look at the latest ad reach data for their brand-specific audiences in order to understand and quantify what paid media campaigns may be offering.



When it comes to user acquisition, marketers still prefer CPMs. Ad spend for non-gaming apps rose to $9 in the second half of this year, up 64% from the first half of 2021, and $19 for gaming apps (up 18%).

In October 2022, Instagram Reels ads now reach 758.5 million users, 0.5% more than the 754.8 million users reported by Meta's ad planning tool in July.

The global audience for Facebook Reels ads has grown by almost 50% in the last three months, and the number of users seeing ads in the Instagram Reels feed has also increased, albeit by a much smaller margin.

The potential ad reach data published in Meta's planning tool is heavily influenced by the number of people who have shown ads on its various platforms in the last 30 days. The decline in Meta's ad reach across platforms is influenced by the number of advertisers and the scale of investment, which may indicate a decline in Meta's share of the overall social media advertising market.