Did you know that many people are spending most of their free time on social media sites? Statistics show that the amount of time individuals are spending on social media has been increasing constantly. Teens
Did you know that many people are spending most of their free time on social media sites? Statistics show that the amount of time individuals are spending on social media has been increasing constantly. Teens are spending up to nine hours of their day on social media platforms. Around 30 percent of the time people spend online is allocated to the social media sites but most of the time is spent on mobile devices (around 60 percent of the time spent on social media is through tablets and smartphones).
The available social media sites have evolved their options and tools to attract and engage more audiences and the advent of live-streaming features and the 360-degree videos and photos is one of the features people find helpful. Some social platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and Musical.ly, are working hard to get a large share of the time people spend on the social space. Accordingly, brands are now choosing social media as the main marketing tool.
To give advertisers a snapshot of the total time people spend on social media, we have analyzed the time spent on various platforms, what it means in the consumer’s lifetime and compared that to various activities and examples of what you can accomplish with an equal amount of time. Amazingly, an average person will spend over 2 hours – around 116 minutes – on social media each day, which translates to nearly 5 years and 4 months in a lifetime. The time we spend on these platforms is likely to increase as the developers introduce many helpful features. Experts believe that social media will eat more into the traditional forms of advertisement such as Radio, TV and newspaper.
The time we spend on the platforms beats the time we spend drinking and eating, grooming and socializing. If we break down the total time we spend across various platforms. YouTube takes much of the time and Facebook follows closely.
How much time do people spend on social media sites?
Assuming that the average person lives for 72 years and that people start using social media sites at the age of 10 years, the average person might spend 3,452,390 minutes on social media throughout their life. That is equal to 6 years and 8 months – as the social media projections for the year 2019 show. That is likely to change within the next few years, so you should take the information lightly. Here is a brief summary of the time the average person spends on some social media sites.
YouTube
YouTube is the social media website that takes most of our time – and there is a reason for that. This platform provides a wide range of videos for the users. In fact, an average individual will spend over 40 minutes a day watching videos on YouTube. That translates to almost 1 year and 10 months in a lifetime.
Facebook stands on the second position. Unsurprisingly each day, the average person spends around 35 minutes scrolling the Facebook Newsfeed. That makes around 1 year and 7 months in the entire life.
Instagram is one of the social media sites owned by Facebook and stands in the third position. An average person will spend around 25 minutes on the social media site each day.
Owned by Facebook, Whatsapp has over 320 million users and people use it to send around 43 billion messages each day. The average person will spend around 28 minutes on the platform each day. WhatsApp also adds a million new users each day.
Snapchat and Twitter
On average, people spend 15 minutes on their Snapchat app each day and around 1 minute on Twitter each day. In other words, they are likely to spend around 18 days on the two sites in their entire life.
LinkedIn is the oldest social media network. However, its professional image has prevented the growth of its user base. With around 546 million daily users, the users do not have anything to sneeze at. On average, people spend 1 minute each day and 17 minutes monthly on the platform.
Pinterest has 70 million daily users and 2 million of them will save pins on their boards. They therefore spend 14.2 minutes on the website each day on average. Over 100 billion pins are saved to over 1 billion boards every nine years and the network has been a leading driver for website traffic.
The health effects of spending a lot of time on social media
The trend is unhealthy. That is because it puts your physical and mental health at risk. If you observe your phone in patterns, you will realize why that is true. For example, some people claim that they feel unhappy whenever they look at their phone or when using it. Social media will make you less productive and feel more scattered. It will also make you more reactive and less centred. Unfortunately, most of the people who have such feelings do not know the cause.
Most of the studies available on the internet support that on psychological levels. Whenever someone scrolls through a social media feed, he/she pumps a large amount of dopamine into his system – mostly the amount is unhealthy. The amount might exceed what your brain can handle and therefore cause a crash. The other negative impact of social media relates to how people switch between their tasks and sending messages on the platform – or moving from one device to the other from time to time. For example, you might have realized that each time you receive an email important email and then receive a text telling you to organize for a night party you are likely to forget about replying to the email.
Use tools to monitor the time you spend on social media
The internet offers a large number of time tracking tools that you can use to know the amount of time you spend on every social media site. Some of the tools are targeted at professionals and businesses that would want to limit the time they spend on particular projects so that they can reduce their bills and serve many clients. Other tools are designed for people who would only want to track the time they spend on particular online activities such as blogging, emailing, reading RSS feeds, micro-blogging, browsing or social networking. Start using them to limit the amount of time you spend on social media sites like Facebook and YouTube.
Importance of social media platform
Social media platforms are important in our life. However, they can be dangerous if used inappropriately. You have to control yourself by reducing the amount of time you spend on them if you would want to live a healthier life. Only invest the right amount of time and you will start feeling healthier. You will feel in control and calmer as you reduce the time you spend on them.