18 Social Media Stats You Need to Know Right Now in 2018

By Sam Butterworth

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Social media is one of the fastest growing phenomenon of our time, with a huge 3.2 billion users predicted for the year 2021. The most recent stats showed that there were 2.46 billion people connected to social media worldwide in 2017, more than double from 2010, just seven years previous.

For small businesses, 2018 is the time to step up their social media marketing. Here are 18 stats that you need to know right now to help you with your campaigns.

  1. Social media users aged 18-34 are the most likely to follow brand they like.

(According to MarketingSherpa)

  1. More than 70% of customers who have a good customer service experience on social media are likely to recommend the brand to others.

(Source: infographic from )

  1. 96% of users who talk about brands on their social pages do not actually follow those brands on social media.

(Data from Brandwatch)  

  1. Facebook has the highest number of users (2.072 billion users), followed by Twitter (330 million), and then Instagram (800 million).

(Figures from StatusBrew)

  1. 91% of retail brands currently use at least two different social media channels to reach their audience.

(Information from StatusBrew)

  1. There is a new social media account opened every 15 seconds across the world.

(Information from StatusBrew)

  1. More than 50 million small businesses worldwide now have a Facebook business page

(Source: Facebook)

  1. Over 4 million businesses pay for Facebook advertising to promote their products and services.

(Source: Forbes)

  1. Almost 80% of marketers are satisfied with the success rates from their Facebook ads, making social PPC strategies a major focus for this year.

(According to Contently)

  1. Customers are likely to spend between 20% and 40% more money with a brand that they have engaged with on social media.

(From an infographic by )

  1. Link click-throughs make up a huge 92% of all user interaction on Twitter.

(Data from HubSpot)

  1. Around 78% of customers who make a complaint with a brand/ retailer/service provider on Twitter expect a response within the hour.

(Source: Lithium)

  1. More than half of B2B brands fail to measure social effectively.

(According to a study from Our Social Times)

  1. The WeChat app is growing, with a whopping 95% of Chinese people aged 16 and over already signed up.

(According to a study from Our Social Times)

  1. Some of the top brands on Instagram have an impressive engagement rate of 4.21%, which is 58 x higher than the engagement on Facebook and 120 x higher than on Twitter respectively.

(Source: Hootsuite)

  1. Social media managers are believed to be wasting the equivalent of two days per week performing admin jobs, such as switching from different platforms.

(According to research by 4C)

  1. Instagram is still very much a platform for the younger generation, with 90% o all account holders younger than 35 years of age.

(Stats from ScienceDaily)

  1. Visual content is over 40 x more likely to get to get shared by other people.

(According to HubSpot)

Learn more about Social Hire

The team at Social Hire never just do social media management.

Our group of specialists are an organisation that helps our clients boost their online marketing by offering social media management services on a monthly basis.

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