Business Insider: Social Media Statistics for 2013

We all like to talk about social networks in terms of scale, because user coverage is a major advantage of social media. Facebook has also received a lot of attention because of this. With 1.2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is an absolute monster.

But as users are always using newer social networks and their social activities become more fragmented, other ways to measure social network activity are becoming more and more important. This is even more important for marketers to decide when and where to invest resources. For these sites, the time each user spends on the platform, how they participate and interact, is playing an increasingly important role in measuring these sites.

In a Business Insider BI Intelligence report, Business Insider compiled the engagement index of major social networks and compared their performance in terms of average time spent per user (desktop and mobile).

Our findings:

• Socializing is now the dominant activity on the Internet: Americans spend an average of 37 minutes a day on social media, much more than any other Internet activity, such as email.
• The rule of mobile social: About 60% of social media time is not spent on desktop computers, but on smartphones or tablets.
• Facebook's engagement is unmatched by other social platforms: Facebook's achievements in user time and engagement are remarkable. In the United States alone, people spend 114 million minutes on Facebook per month, through PCs and smartphones. In comparison, Instagram spends 8 million minutes per month, and Twitter only 5.3 million minutes per month.
• Whether on smartphones or desktops, Facebook engagement is nearly seven times higher than Twitter.
• Snapchat has a smaller network than WhatsApp, but each user spends more time on it than WhatsApp
• Pineterest, Tumblr and Linkedin successfully increased user engagement on mobile devices in 2013. The new competition in social media will no longer be about users themselves, but about engagement on multiple devices.

Social media across multiple devices: Business Insider based its analysis on its Bi Smart Social Media Engagement Ranking, which compares how well social networks retain users across smartphones and desktops.

Below is the ranking of BI’s PC-smartphone engagement across five social platforms:

Facebook, 50.7

Instagram, 13.5

Twitter, 7.4

Snapchat, 6.6

WhatsApp, 4.6