Which channels are working in 2024?
It seems like this social media thing is here to stay. This week we crossed a pretty mind-blowing milestone: 5 Billion active users.
That number was reported in WeAreSocial’s annual report called Digital 2024, and perhaps the most incredible part of that news is that basically no one was surprised.
Today, there are more active social media accounts than there were humans in the 80s, and we all sort of shrugged because “of course everyone is on social media.”
So, given that posting and sharing are apparently here to stay, we dug into the numbers from that report, as well as Rival IQ’s Industry Benchmark Report, to understand how people are using social media these days. First, let’s talk about the thing we’re all wondering: How are the biggest channels working these days, and how often are brands posting there?
- Engagement per post: 0.063%
- Posts per week: 4.69
To no one’s surprise, Facebook engagement is in the gutter. Fewer than 1 of every 1,000 people who follow a brand will engage with their posts, and yet we persist. Organizations that use Facebook tend to post there roughly once per business day.
- Engagement per post: 0.43%
- Posts per week: 4.7
The most talked about social channel when it comes to branded social media, Instagram does, in fact, have a significantly greater average engagement rate, but it’s still less than 1 in 100.
Twitter (X)
- Engagement per post: 0.029%
- Posts per week: 3.31
Maybe the most surprising number here is that brands are still Tweeting (do we still call it that?). Although, I suspect that the number is skewed by the most active accounts since a lot of us have stopped posting altogether.
TikTok
- Engagement per post: 2.63%
- Posts per week: 1.92
This is the result that I believe we all had suspected, but it’s illuminating to see it stacked up against the three other major channels. Right now, TikTok is getting more than 6X the engagement that we see on Instagram, and 42X more than Facebook. And yet, TikTok is where we see the least amount of content being posted by brands, which suggests that there is still a pretty significant opportunity gap.
The full report is presented in a 561-page deck, but for those of us who don’t have an entire day to spend flipping through slides, they’ve broken down the key results into a pretty interesting video that includes their “10 Essential Takeaways.”
Check out the full report here
A few more headlines that caught our eye:
- TikTok users spend 34 hours per month on the app
- YouTube is the 2nd most-used app, at 28 hours
- Snapchat continues to grow with 400 million daily active users
- Linkedin has over 1 billion active members, with 1 in 8 users registering in the past year
- Digital accounts for 70% of global ad spend
- Social ad budgets are up 15% year over year
- TikTok’s total ad audience has caught up to Instagram, and is now roughly equal
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