Tracking ICT Trends Using Social Media Data
DataReportal’s chief analyst, Simon Kemp, presented at the ITU’s 17th annual World Telecommunication & ICT Indicators Symposium on 01 December 2020.
Simon’s presentation explores how the social media data in DataReportal’s ongoing Global Digital Reports series can help policy makers, NGOs, and various other kinds of organisation to identify and track trends in broader internet adoption and ICT use around the world, especially in developing countries.
You can watch the full presentation in the YouTube video below, but read on below for a complete transcript of Simon’s talk track.
You’ll also find the complete set of slides used in this presentation as a SlideShare embed at the bottom of this post.
Video transcript
Thanks very much to all of you for joining us today.
It’s a real privilege to be able to contribute to today’s symposium, so I’d like to say a big thank you to the ITU for inviting me to speak.
I’m Simon Kemp, and over the next 10 minutes or so, I’ll be sharing some findings taken from social media data that I believe offer valuable insights into broader ICT adoption and behaviours.
Just a bit of context before I begin; I run a management consultancy called Kepios that helps organisations all over the world to make sense of what people are really doing online.
And a big part of our work builds on the Global Digital Reports that we produce on behalf of We Are Social and Hootsuite.
These reports provide the very latest insights into what people are doing online in every country in the world, and – best of all – we make all of these reports available completely for free over at DataReportal.com.
The reports cover a wide variety of digital behaviours, but our social media data is particularly interesting for anyone studying ICT adoption, because it offers almost real-time insights into evolving digital trends.
What’s more, we can break this data down by age, gender, and location, and these are the areas that I’ll be exploring with you in today’s presentation.
We should get a chance to address some of your questions in the panel discussion later in today’s session, but if you have any questions for me after today, you’ll find me on Twitter and LinkedIn as ‘eskimon’.
But with that, let’s dive into the data, starting with a quick overview of social media use around the world.
Headlines and trends
And the big headline to start with is that more than half of the world’s total population now uses social media each month.
Our Digital 2020 October Global Statshot Report reveals that more than 4.1 billion people around the world use social media today, equating to roughly 53 percent of the world’s total population.
However, it’s worth remembering that most social media companies restrict use of their platforms to people aged 13 and above.
So, if we compare the number of social media users to populations in eligible age groups, the data show that more than two-thirds of all of those people who can use social media already do.
User numbers have been growing quickly over recent months too.
The latest data show that global social media users have increased by more than 450 million in the past 12 months, equating to year-on-year growth of more than 12 percent.
What’s more, social media growth actually appears to be accelerating.
Global user numbers grew by 180 million during Q3, representing quarter-on-quarter growth of 4.6 percent.
For perspective, that means an average of almost 2 million people started using social media for the first time every single day between July and September.
However, just as we see with broader internet use, social media use still isn’t evenly distributed around the world.
If we compare the latest social media user numbers to eligible populations aged 13 and above, we see that adoption varies significantly by region.
For example, roughly 8 in 9 people aged 13-plus across Central and Southern America use social media today, but that figure drops to less than 1 in 8 in Middle Africa.
But these figures don’t just offer insights into social media adoption.
Our analysis suggests that nearly 9 in every 10 internet users around the world now use social media.
And these high levels of adoption may point to a potential opportunity.
If such a large share of internet users are indeed active on social media, could this data also help us to identify broader trends in ICT adoption and use around the world?
With that hypothesis in mind, let’s dig a bit deeper into the data to see what it might tell us, starting with a closer look at social media adoption by age.
#1: Social media use by age
And perhaps unsurprisingly, the simplest finding is that younger people account for the largest share of social media users.
Combined, de-duplicated advertising audience data for Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger shows that people aged 18 to 34 account for more than half of these platforms’ total users.
Note that this advertising audience data doesn’t cover all of these platforms’s users, and in particular, it doesn’t include users living in countries affected by US sanctions.
Furthermore, it doesn’t include a representative sample of social media users in China, due to the reduced availability of these platforms within the country.
However, the latest report from CNNIC shows that these younger age groups also account for the largest share of China’s 930 million social media users.
Now, the previous chart offered insights into the share of social media audiences by age and gender.
But this next chart shows the percentage of the total population in each age group that uses social media, once again based on that combined audience for Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger.
Now, it’s worth highlighting that this data only covers those countries where those platforms account for the largest share of social media users.
But with those caveats in mind, this data indicates that 9 in every 10 people aged 18 to 24 already use social media today, with the figure for people aged 25 to 34 not far behind, at 86 percent.
Now, it is worth noting that there are some interesting curiosities in Facebook’s age data, because the company reports audience age based on users’ self-reported values.
For example, as we can see here, there are some peculiar spikes in user numbers at ages 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 and 60.
My hypothesis is that these spikes are the result of users rounding their year of birth to the nearest turn of a decade, either due to privacy concerns, or perhaps due to some gentle vanity.
However, I still haven’t worked out why there’s a spike in users born in 1987, who show up as the peculiar spike at 33 years old on this chart
Just in case you’re curious though, the pattern of these spikes is identical for both male and female users.
But as a result of these anomalies, we need to be careful not to go down to too granular a level when analysing age data from these platforms.
And my advice would be to focus on broader age groups when analysing social media data, rather than trying to analyse the data by single-year age bands.
However, these anomalies have remained relatively stable over the past few years, so we can still draw representative insights from how these numbers evolve over time.
And one of the most interesting findings is that older age groups have seen some of the fastest growth in social media adoption over the past few months.
For example, as we can see on this chart, people aged 65 and above represent Facebook’s fastest-growing audience at the moment.
And user numbers in this age group have increased twice as quickly as the overall average over the past 12 months.
This next chart tracks quarterly growth in Facebook users aged 65 and above, and as you can see in the middle of the chart here, growth accelerated significantly between January and April, when people started to adjust their behaviour due to the emerging coronavirus pandemic.
However, growth in older users hasn’t been restricted to Facebook.
Interestingly, a similar growth pattern has also been playing out on Instagram, which has typically been seen as a more youth-oriented platform.
And while it’s worth noting that older age groups started from a more modest base, Instagram users aged 65 and above have increased by 64 percent since this time last year.
As I alluded to earlier, my hypothesis is that COVID-19 has played a meaningful role in these trends, as older people try to stay in touch with younger family members whilst following social distancing guidelines.
However, while the cause of these trends may only be temporary, there’s a good chance that their impact will be much more enduring.
And that’s because social media tends to be a high-frequency activity, with data from various platforms indicating that more than half of all users are active each day.
So, if seniors also use social media on a regular basis, their overall levels of digital familiarity should increase, resulting in greater confidence and adoption of other areas of ICT.
But social media data doesn’t just offer useful insights into age; it’s also helpful when it comes to mapping the digital divide between genders.
#2: The social gender gap
Now, just before we dig into the data here, it’s important to note that most social platforms only allow advertisers to target by binary gender, so I’m only able to report data for ‘female’ and ‘male’ audiences.
But even this binary data offers some valuable insights.
For example, at a global level, women account for 45.9 percent of social media users, while men account for 54.1 percent.
Relatively speaking, that means men are roughly 18 percent more likely to use social media than women.
And for reference, that figure closely matches the gender gap reported by GSMA Intelligence for general mobile internet use around the world.
However, social media data clearly indicates that the gender gap varies significantly by region.
For example, female social media users actually outnumber male users across the Americas and Europe, while gender ratios are relatively evenly balanced in Eastern and Southeastern Asia.
But the data tell quite a different story for the Middle East, Africa, and Southern Asia.
And in particular, Southern Asia shows the greatest imbalance in social media use by gender, with male users currently outnumbering female users by a factor of 3 to 1.
What’s more, this gender gap in Southern Asia has only narrowed by a couple of percentage points in the past 2 years, despite the overall number of social media users in the region growing by more than 30 percent.
However, the data also show that once women start using social media, they tend to be more active than men.
For example, data from Facebook shows that women are almost twice as likely as men to post a comment, and in some age groups, women are almost 3 times as likely to comment as their male peers.
Once again, values vary meaningfully by country, but our analysis suggests that levels of economic development are not the only driver of these differences.
For example, the typical female Facebook user in Moldova leaves 7 times as many comments as her male compatriot.
But in Benin and Pakistan, men are significantly more likely to post comments than women.
And while this chart only looks at one specific action on Facebook, even these limited findings may offer valuable insights into the likelihood that women will engage in other kinds of public online activity too.
So, as we’ve already seen, social media data can offer a wealth of insights into ICT use by age and gender.
But what about insights into ICT adoption in urban versus rural areas?
#3: Access by location: urban vs rural use
Now it’s important to note that there’s no globally agreed definition for what constitutes an ‘urban’ setting, so I’ll be comparing social media activity in larger cities to activity outside of those conurbations.
Once again though, these simple comparisons provide some very useful insights.
For example, the data suggest that more than half of the combined global audience of Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger lives in cities with at least half a million inhabitants.
And if we compare that to the share of the total population that lives in these cities, we learn that social media users are far more likely to live in large urban centres than the population as a whole.
Specifically, 52 percent of the world’s social media users live in cities with at least half a million inhabitants, but just 29 percent of the world’s total population lives in those same locations.
And the takeaway from this data is that rural communities are significantly less likely to have adopted internet-connected technologies than their city-dwelling peers.
More importantly however, this urban-rural split is even more pronounced in developing economies.
The tables on this chart show the share of the total population living in cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants, and compares that ratio to the share of the country’s social media users that live in those same locations.
Now, the key data here is the ‘social vs. population’ column on the right-hand side of each table, which compares the urban concentration of each country’s social media users to the urban concentration of its overall population.
And the higher the number in those right-hand columns, the more likely it is that social media users are concentrated in big cities, with a significantly smaller share of users living in small towns or rural areas.
Now, for ease of comparison, I’ve highlighted a number of developing economies in orange text.
And as you can see from those right-hand columns, the urban concentration of social media audiences in these countries is considerably higher than the urban concentration in more developed nations.
And it’s particularly high in Ethiopia and Uganda, where social media users are more than 11 times as likely to live in large cities as those countries’ populations as a whole.
But given the importance of tracking this urban-rural divide – especially when it comes to issues such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals – the encouraging takeaway from these findings is that social media data may be able to offer simple and timely ways to supplement more comprehensive survey data.
Summary
Sadly that’s all I’ve got time for in today’s presentation, but hopefully that’s already given you plenty to think about, and inspired some new ideas for your own research.
I’ll be happy to try and answer any questions you may have as part of the upcoming panel discussion too, so here’s a quick recap of the topics I’ve covered over the past 10 minutes.
Don’t worry if you don’t get a chance to ask a question during the panel, though – you’ll find tens of thousands more charts exploring digital behaviours for every country in the world in our free reports over on DataReportal.com
And do please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter if you’d like to stay up to date with our ongoing research.
That’s all from me for today though – thanks again to the ITU team for inviting me to participate, and thanks to all of you for joining us too.
Presentation slides
You’ll find the complete set of slides used in this presentation in the SlideShare embed below (click here if that’s not working for you).