I think we can all agree that social media has dramatically changed the we way we live. From how we interact with others, read the news, connect with businesses and make purchasing decisions; it’s extremely powerful and isn’t showing any sign of leaving. It has around 3.2 billion users worldwide, which is a crazy 42% of the population. Users are spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social media and 3.26 billion people are using their mobile phones to access the platforms, which is up 10% from last year. As it is becoming increasingly popular in our daily lives, it offers businesses more and more opportunities to reach out to their audiences.

Social media is definitely worth using for your business, but what platform is best to use to reach your target audience? With popular social platforms growing daily, the audience for each has the tendency to change over time. Whether you’ve been using social media for your business for years or are just getting started, it’s important to base your strategy on hard stats. As it’s the beginning of the year, we thought we would share the most important social media usage stats in 2020 for the biggest platforms, to help you create your best strategy yet.

Facebook

Since it began, Facebook has been shaping the social media landscape. With over 2.32 billion active users (those who have used it in the last 30 days), it is the most widely used platform. It is also the second-most popular site in the world (behind Google) with an average time per visit of 10:57.

Here are a few stats on its users:

• Roughly 74% of Facebook users access the platform daily, and 51% visit multiple times per day.
• Facebook users spend 38 minutes per day using the platform.
• Roughly 44.86 million residents of the UK used Facebook as of December 2019. Interestingly, this number is slightly down from November 2019, when a reported 45.17 million people used it.
• A crazy 94% of adults in the UK between the ages of 25 to 34 have their own profile, according to Ofcom.
• Facebook’s gender split is 56% male and 44% female, with 24% percent of global active Facebook users being women between the ages of 18 and 34 years and 35% of global active Facebook users being men between the ages of 18 and 34 years.

Facebook is also widely used by businesses:

• 95% of businesses worldwide use Facebook.
• 6 billion people are connected to small businesses on Facebook.
• People and businesses exchange more than 10 billion messages per month.
• After messaging a brand on Facebook, 66% of people feel more confident about the brand, and 55% feel more personally connected to the brand.

Instagram

There are more than 1 billion monthly active users of Instagram worldwide, with roughly 60% of Instagram users accessing the platform every day. Interestingly, 500 million people use Instagram Stories daily (compared to the 150 million that use Facebook Stories). The platform is used most by a younger audience of 18-24 year olds, with 22% of users visiting it several times a day.

Here are some business stats for Instagram:

• Instagram has more than 25 million business profiles.
• 74% of businesses worldwide use Instagram.
• 80% of users follow at least one business on Instagram, and more than 200 million people visit at least one business profile every day.
• A third of the most viewed Instagram stories are from businesses.
• 60% of Instagram users claim they’ve discovered at least one new product on the platform.
• Hashtags on Instagram are important with 70% being branded.