It’s a changing landscape, alright.
In the UK, social media is evolving and it pays as a communicator to be across this.
So, bravo Ofcom who have published their Online Nation data which sets out in some glorious detail the numbers.
I’ll return to this data dump in the coming weeks to upgrade training slides and I’ll try and blog a snapshot for you.
I’ve used the Ofcom data to create a visualisation of the direction of travel with UK social media.
I’ve taken the data and represented it as a percentage of the UK population rather than simply users.
You can see it here:
Honestly, datamapper is an absolutely brilliant tool.
The question behind the data was ‘what platforms have you used in the previous month?’
Here’s five points on what it all means.
YouTube is the largest and gets criminally ignored
YouTube is the largest social platform in the UK. Yet, often organisation’s YouTube channels can best be described as a rag tag after thought where video gets sent to expire. At worst, they are poorly tagged, poorly labelled historic mishmash with a handful of views.
It demands the question, how can you improve what you are doing with YouTube? There’s an entire blog post in that alone.
70 per cent use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp
Elsewhere in the report, is the gem that seven in ten in the UK are using the Meta triumverate of Facebook, Insta and WhatsApp.
Frustratingly, Ofcom have stopped including messenging apps in the numbers which isn’t ideal. So, WhatsApp aren’t in this top 10. Elsewhere in the report, data shows that 87 per cent of UK people use WhatsApp monthly and 64 per cent use it daily.
That makes WhatsApp the most used messenger – or social – app in the UK.
X, formerly Twitter is falling
The decline is real. Year on year Elon Musk’s platform has dropped by eight per cent. The data for this report is from May 2024 so it predates the UK and US elections. I would not be surprised if the figures heralded a larger drop next year.
The only surprise I have at this is that it hasn’t fallen further.
No Nextdoor
In previous years, I’ve seen Nextdoor in the top 10 but in 2024 that’s not the case. Nextdoor is a community-based platform that has some advantages for public sector organisations.
Not cropping up in this list would suggest the platform may be in decline.
Reddit… ruddy hell
Reddit is up by an astonishing 47 per cent on the 2024 Ofcom list. Reddit is described as a platform where users curate information by voting on it in specific communities. So, there are Reddits for a whole range of subjects. Two thirds of Reddit users are under 29 and they tend to be more tech savvy.
In the past, I’ve heard of great strides in creating ads on Reddit. I’d be interested to see how this goes for people.
TikTok is up
The rise of TikTok continues. After Reddit, it has the largest rise in Ofcom’s table of stats up 13 per cent. A third of the UK uses this vertical video platform.
The fact it is not longer the sexiest on the block in 2024 – BlueSky may have that – in a curious way makes it more of a proposition. Things often get interesting when they are boring.
Snapchat is still here
One of the biggest strategic mistakes you can make is to base your organisation’s output based on what you or the chief exec likes. It can be the block to TikTok in many places. For me, this can be folly as you skew your channels away from your audience.
I don’t use Snapchat but if I was trying to reach young people that’s a platform I’d be looking at. The numbers here remain strong for the platform used most by teenagers.
Whatabout Threads and BlueSky?
Whatabout them indeed. The cool kids are all about BlueSky but neither they or Meta’s Threads are in the top 10. Both were launched as being Twitter killers.
Buried in the Ofcom report is the insight that there are 5.3 million active Threads users in the UK in May 2024. There’s no data I’ve come across yet for BlueSky.
I hope this list helps you think of what your comms needs to look like in 2025.
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