15 things to take away from the @insites social media around the world study 2011

Last week InSites Consulting shared the results of their Social Media Around The World study, edition 2011. An extensive study on the state of social media usage.

A pile of interesting data. We have selected 15 important take-aways:

1. There are now more than 1 billion social network users worldwide. Probably, if we accumulate all users across the different platforms, we are at about 1,3 billion in total.
2. Age 35-54 is the biggest social networking age group across all networks. These results show that social networks are clearly not for youngsters only, on the contrary, they are mainly used in ‘older’ target groups.
3. On average people have 133 Facebook friends and 59 Twitter followers. These averages are probably influenced by the heavy users, but still give a good indication.
4. The average Facebook session lasts 37 minutes, on Twitter 23 minutes. Compared to the average time on websites (which is about 2 minutes), this is huge.
5. 80% is aware of Twitter, but only 16% uses it. Hence, there is lots of potential left for Twitter, question is of course whether they will succeed in turning awareness into actual usage.
6. When it comes to LinkedIn, penetration in Europe is only 11%.
7. The network Vkontakte is big in Eastern Europe, with a penetration of  39%. There’s a lot of attention for the so called Big4 social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & LinkedIn), but several regions clearly have specific social networks with huge amounts of members. Vkontakte in Eastern Europe is a good example, but also think about Orkut in Brazil and QZone in China.
8. Media & Entertainment are the most popular industries for following brands, Fashion & Luxury goods come in second place. These results acknowledge other studies, showing that people like to share the ‘social objects’ that come from media & fashion companies.
9. Social networkers prefer to share positive experiences (61%) they had with brands over negative experiences (46%). People are not just bashing brands and companies in social networks, they mainly prefer to spread positive word of mouth.
10. Positive brand experiences of others have the highest impact on brand perception and buying intention (62%), rather than negative experiences of others (53%).
11. 61% of employed social networkers is proud on the company they work for, but only 19% talks about it. Companies all to often forget the ‘social power’ of their own employees. People have to be stimulated and facilitated to share the pride for their work and company.
12. 33% cannot access social network sites at work. This means that a lot of  companies are still not fully leveraging the potential of ‘social’, seeing only the possible disadvantages instead of the opportunities for business.
13. On a company level: 25% has written a policy about social media usage. 13% receives social media training. Facebook was founded back in 2004 and Twitter  in 2006, so most companies waited very long before taking the impact of social media really serious. A lot of them are starting out today on social media.
14. 12% of smartphone users makes use of location based services. 20% of LBS users check in daily. 37% is not using LBS because of privacy concerns. Location based services are still in ‘early adopters’ phase, but the increase of smartphone penetration and awareness of location based services will push this evolution.
15. 4% of smartphone users make use of augmented reality. As more and more ‘practical’ augmented reality solutions are hitting the market, also this number will probably increase rapidly.

All detailed results can be found in this SlideShare presentation: