7 staggering social media use by-the-minute stats

Eight of the world’s most popular social networks generate an astonishing amount of content every minute. The social “universe,” composed of every single digitally connected person, doubles in size every two years, and by 2020 it will reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion GBs, according to IDC. Social media platforms collectively play a big part in the data consumers create and share. Here’s a look at seven popular platforms, all of which provided relevant usage statistics during the past year.

Facebook is a true phenomenon in terms of the media it generates and shares on behalf of its 1.44 billion monthly active users. Those users send an average of 31.25 million messages and view 2.77 million videos every minute, according to statistics released by Facebook in March.

Twitter’s 288 million monthly active users tweet a combined average of 347,222 times per minute. That’s about 1.2 tweets per monthly user each minute. However, many users tweet more than a hundred times per day, and even more people tweet much less often than every day.

LinkedIn has 347 million registered members, and an average of two new people join the professional network every second, according to the company. Every minute, at least 17,361 member profiles are viewed on average and three long-form posts are published, according to figures published by LinkedIn during the second half of 2014.

More than 30 billion photos were shared on Instagram during the 4.5 years following the photo-sharing app’s launch. The Facebook-owned property now has 300 million monthly active users, and 70 percent of them reside outside the United States. Each minute, Instagram users post a combined 48,611 photos, and they like 1.73 million posts, according to the company.

Tinder developed and capitalized on an entirely new behavior for mobile matchmaking and dating. Its users “swipe” other Tinder profiles an average of 694,444 times every minute, according to numbers the company shared with The New York Times in October 2014. Tinder says it helped make more than six billion matches since the service launched in the fall of 2012, and more than 26 million matches occur each day.

YouTube has more than a billion users who watch hundreds of millions of hours of video every day, according to the company. An average of 300 hours of YouTube video are uploaded every minute, and that number increased by 50 percent year over year in 2014. At least half of the decade-old video platform’s views occur on mobile devices.

When Vine launched more than two years ago, it introduced the concept of six-second video loops to the online masses. At the beginning of 2015, Vine’s General Manager Jason Toff announced that more than 1.5 billion video loops are viewed every day, which breaks down to an average of 1,041,666 video loops per minute. As of August 2014, more than 100 million people watched Vine videos each month, and 8,333 new videos were shared every minute in April 2014.