Internet user growth is booming – 3 billion people on social media alone
If you thought you couldn’t handle any more social media platforms or friend updates on your Instagram feed, you’re not alone. In a collaboration between We Are Social and Hootsuite, a new Global Digital Snapshot shows that the number of people using social media around the world has just passed 3 billion. Mashable reports that this is about 40% of the global population.
Some other interesting numbers for the August 2017 findings show that there are more than 5 billion unique mobile numbers, and 2.7 billion mobile social users. This means much of social media interaction is done on mobile.
The Next Web writes that growth trends for social media are rapidly increasing as well – growing at a rate of one million new users per day over the last quarter. The top categories of apps that users gravitate towards are communication apps, content, games, travel, and shopping. Other top app themes include food, fitness, and finance.
Social media is just one chunk of larger, overall Internet trends. Cisco contributes to discovering the latest phases of digital transformation by predicting traffic projections in their Visual Networking Index (VNI). With these predictions, we can easily see how massive and disruptive the Internet will be in the years to come.
In the most recent VNI report, Cisco found that 58% of the global population will be Internet users by 2021, and that the average Internet user will generate 61GB of Internet traffic per month by the same year. That is a huge 155% increase of data from 2016. Moreover, Internet video traffic – business and consumer – will be 80% of all Internet traffic by 2021.
Because so much of social media is done on mobile, there are also big predictions for the mobility market. Cisco forecasts that global mobile data traffic will increase sevenfold from 2016 to 2021, and that there will be 5.5 billion mobile users in 2021 (which is up from 4.9 billion in 2016).
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