Social media marketing had been essential for any business even before the COVID-19 pandemic started. However, the need for social media marketing increased significantly in 2020 During the lockdowns due to multiple reasons.
Almost every business had to start operating and selling on the Internet, which increased the competition manyfold. Moreover, social media usage grew the fastest in the last three years during the pandemic. According to the current statistics, there are more than 4.3 billion social media users globally.
The reports have also revealed that the Internet and technology have become an indispensable part of more than half the world’s population. The pandemic has resulted in a significant increase in the use of e-commerce, media content streaming, video games, and other consumer-oriented technologies.
In this article, we will talk about the social media statistics in the UK for 2021. We feel that every company in London indulging in social media marketing should be aware of these statistics.
The British Social Media Usage Statistics
More than 45 million people in the UK use social media, which is almost 66% of the population living in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. We had noticed a growing trend for screen time reduction back in 2019. However, it seems that people are not yet ready to turn their backs on social media, especially after the pandemic.
In fact, the average social media usage in the UK has increased by 7 minutes in the last year. It may not seem much, but the increase in average usage time from 1 hour 42 minutes to 1 hour 49 minutes can mean significantly better opportunities for social media marketing. That is why businesses in London are connecting with social media marketing agencies to maximize their brand visibility and awareness.
A reputable London social media agency told us that even though there is no UK-centric data, the younger demographics are spending more time on social media. We also found that female usage of every social media platform is significantly higher than male usage for every age group. Their data also reveals that men use social media for work more than women in all age groups.
Usage Across Platforms
The usage of social media in the UK is almost consistent in the last year. However, there has been a continuous growth in the popularity of TikTok. On average, people in the UK between the ages of 16 to 64 have 6.9 social media accounts. We also noticed that there is a user overlap for social platforms.
Any person using social media certainly uses more than one platform. Users usually have a preferred platform they like to spend more time on than the rest of them. That means brands can use multiple platforms to reach their target audience.
It has been noticed that researching products or services is one of the topmost reasons globally for people to use social media platforms. Almost 28% of social media users in the UK use the platforms to research brands, which is slightly lesser than the global average.
It shows that social shopping has gained a lot of importance in the last year and has become one of the key trends in 2021. Therefore, brands can guide their target customers to their websites and product pages as they perform brain research on social media apps.
Facebook users may have decreased slightly in the past year. However, the giant is still the global leader in social media usage, with more than 2.18 billion users. Many people have the impression that the Facebook demographic is slowly shifting to older users. But the global statistics speak otherwise. It states that 61.3% of the people using Facebook around the globe are aged under 35.
Engagement on Facebook in the UK is still much more than the global average. Facebook users in the UK tend to like on 14 posts and comment on 7 on an average every month. They also click on almost 19 ads every month, which is almost double the global statistics.
After Facebook, YouTube is the second most popular platform in the world. YouTube ads also have a substantial reach. It is estimated that almost 53 million people (84% of the adults) can be reached in the UK through YouTube ads.
31 million people use Instagram in the UK as of January 2021, with 7 million new users in the last year. Instagram claims that they can reach 53% of the population in the UK through their advertising. They also stated that 54% of Instagram users in the UK are females.
LinkedIn ads have the potential to influence almost 30 million professionals in the UK. That means brands can reach almost 56% of the adults in the UK via LinkedIn advertisement.
According to Twitter, there are 16.5 million users in the UK who can be reached with advertisements. There has been a small decrease of 1.2% in Twitter users since 2020, but the advertisement potential is still huge.
In the UK, brands can reach more than 10.7 million people through Pinterest. Pinterest usage has also increased slightly since 2020, and most users are aged between 25 to 44. It has also been noted that 77% of Pinterest users are females.
TikTok has recently launched several tools and put in extra effort to attract business users. TikTok has also initiated a series of sessions to train small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to increase their social marketing through the platform. Almost 3.7 million people use TikTok in the UK. The number of TikTok users has been predicted to grow over 10 million by the end of 2021.
Snapchat has 7 million users in the UK, while 2 million people access Clubhouse. The latter is growing extremely fast and had only 600,000 active users back in December 2020.
So as we can see, 2021 is all set to become a great year for social media marketing. With these statistics in mind, businesses in London and the rest of the UK can create successful social media marketing strategies for their brands.
The social media giants have consistent usage there does not seem to be diminishing soon. Brands can also use emerging platforms such as TikTok or Clubhouse to find creative ways to reach their target audience.
