Social marketing agency We Are Social has released its latest whopper Digital, Social and Mobile study covering 240 plus countries and it shows that:
*The reported number of internet users around the world increased 20 per cent since the same time last year, with half a billion new users recognised over the past 12 months.
*The number of social media users has gone up by 12 per cent year-on-year, and more than two billion people now use their respective country’s most active social network every month.
*Mobile social use has grown 23 per cent in the same period, and Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Viber have all published numbers showing growth of more than 100 million active users in the past year.
*More than half the world now has a mobile phone, with 185 million new unique users signing up since January 2014 to take the number of global users to 3.65 billion. These users maintain an average of almost two subscriptions each, meaning the number of mobile connections now exceeds the total world population.
That the world is increasingly connected – as we digerati say – is no surprise but the numbers are still staggering. It’s probably only a matter of time before there are more smartphones in the world than people.
