2024 Social Media in the UK - Stats & Strategies

The UK has one of the highest rates of social media users world-wide, per capita. It has become popular for the millions of businesses using various platforms to connect with potential clients and to promote brand awareness.

Social Media has become increasingly important, particularly since 2020 (Covid & Lockdown), not only for social interaction but for commercial reach, both B2C and B2B. Here follows a collection of statistics regarding Social Media today, with a focus on business use in the UK.

In total, the annual growth in active social media users is almost 9% - that's 57 million of the total population of 68 million, almost 60 million of whom own mobile 'phones. Just over one million people in the UK don't use the Internet, which is a significantly low percentage (approximately 0.02%). As an aside, we'll assume that the majority of these may be very young, old or in some way unable (homelessness, comatose) to be Internet users but what of those who choose not to? Interesting, but a different topic.

Across the age groups, active female users outnumber male users except for work-related social media where male users are dominant. 

For example, LinkedIn is meant to be B2B and, therefore, is not strictly social media. Nevertheless, it is the 5th most popular platform with almost 20 million users. You'd think it would be perfect for businesses to connect and push their brands but, if you actively use LinkedIn, you will see that success rates for creating new, lucrative business sales are rare. People who post are more discerning than on, say, Facebook but LinkedIn has it's fair share of humorous posts. It's also considered a good platform for companies who are recruiting. 

Meta's Facebook, still leader of the pack with almost 50 million users in the UK, is used by businesses to  encourage followers and to sell to consumers, although some of the advertisements have received scathing reviews. Meta's Instagram is a fast-growing medium and is heading towards 40 million users. X formerly known as Twitter has 30 million active users. After LinkedIn, X-Twitter is the platform that boasts a reasonable number of active male users (more than females). 

This could have been a different story - more than 30% of users considered leaving when Elon Musk acquired it, re-naming it as X. Interestingly, the most popular Twitter account in the UK is BBC news with around 37 million followers from around the world. Other popular social media (not covered in this post) include Pinterest and Reddit. TikTok, Tumblr and others are way down in the rankings.

But what of YouTube? Its users are also more than 50% male. Worldwide, YouTube is second only to Facebook for numbers of users, with Instagram and WhatsApp (both Meta) in joint third place with two billion users each. The UK does not feature in the top ten countries, which are: India (heading for half a billion users), The USA (over a quarter-billion), Brazil and Indonesia (more than 100 million), Mexico, Japan, Pakistan, Germany, Vietnam and Philippines (more than 50 million). However, Per Capita, the UK is in third place, with 391 billion views, and in top spot, worldwide, with 5,750 views per person for the last year. 

Undoubtedly, whilst most YouTube content is leisure viewing rather than business, there is a significant commercial element - YouTube ads. In the last quarter of 2023, these generated around $8bn in revenue for Google's YouTube arm, almost $2.5bn from the UK (whether advertisers were happy with the results, we can only surmise that, if they're not, Google's revenue will eventually decrease). 

Interesting note - the longest YouTube video is over 570 hours of a slide show of many, many photographs of a user's trip to Chile!

According to Alexa, the most visited websites in the UK are Google then Amazon then Reddit. Google is also the most popular search engine in the UK, with over 90% share.