A Social Engagement Primer: A Portrait Of Time-Spend And Activity On The Top Social Networks

KEY POINTS

• Americans spend an average of 37 minutes daily on social media, a higher time-spend than any other major Internet activity, including email.

• Sixty percent or so of social media time is spent on smartphones and tablets. That means mobile-first social networks will find it easier to engage users for longer periods.

• Surprisingly, Tumblr is No. 2 in the U.S. for total time spent social networking on desktop. It's also No. 2 for time-spend per user. Facebook leads both categories.

• We score major social media networks in terms of their ability to drive time-spend on a per-user basis. According to our Engagement Index, explained in detail below, Facebook is the most effective among five popular social networks at keeping individual users glued to the service, but Instagram is in second place and Twitter in third when desktop and mobile engagement is accounted for.

• The battle between social media platforms has become less about audience growth, and more about boosting engagement, particularly on mobile. Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn have all done their best to achieve engagement gains. In 2012, Pinterest increased the amount of time users spend on its mobile apps 3.5 times faster than overall mobile app audience growth.

• But social engagement goes beyond how long people spend scrolling their feed. Getting users to participate on a social network is the key to creating a social feed worth coming back to. Photo-sharing remains the most popular activity, while posting a status update is becoming less central. Activities like "pinning," sending "snaps," creating posts, and engaging in Group chats are all rewriting what it means to participate in a social network.

INTRODUCTION

We tend to talk about social networks in terms of their size, because audience reach is one of social media’s biggest advantages. That’s why Facebook gets so much attention. With 1.2 billion monthly active users, it’s a beast.

But as audiences adopt newer social networks, and people’s social activity becomes increasingly fragmented, other measures of social network activity become more important, especially for businesses trying to determine where to best allocate time and resources. How much time users spend on each social network and how engaged and interactive they are with content there are increasingly important ways of evaluating the sites.

It’s easy to sign up for yet another social network, and the statistics show many of these smaller sites just keep growing. But then the question becomes — how much attention has the latest social network really captured, and are other networks losing engagement as these sites rise?

The data shows that there is no longer a direct correlation between the number of active users a network has, on desktop or mobile, and overall engagement in terms of the amount of time users spend on a site and how active they are.

In this report, we look at how much time social media is now occupying in Internet users’ daily lives and how time-spend is distributed across different networks. We also look at some of the breakout surprises, including the networks that are seeing engagement grow faster than overall audience size. The report then turns to what kinds of activities are popular on the different networks, and how compelled users are to participate, rather than to simply scroll their feed.

This report serves as an ideal companion to our recent reports on platform-specific social media strategies and social media demographics.

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Social Media Time-Spend Overview

Social media has already become the most popular online activity among U.S. Internet users. Both GfK and the IAB found that Americans spent an average 37 minutes on social media sites last year, compared to 33 minutes on what was once the most essential Internet function: email.

Mobile drives even more engagement with social media. On mobile, the weight of social time-spend is even greater than it is on the desktop.

Nielsen found in March 2013 that mobile app users spent an average 9 hours and 6 minutes per month on social media usage activities.

By comparison, BI Intelligence estimates that desktop social media usage accounted for slightly more than two-thirds as much time spend: six hours and 27 minutes.

• That works out to about 13 minutes per person per day spent on social media on desktop PCs.
• If we add time spent on social media over the mobile Web and apps, then mobile’s dominance is even more pronounced, totaling about 21 minutes per user per day.

This will give mobile-first social networks an edge in engagement. It’s likely contributing to the increasing strength of comparatively newer social networks like Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat, all of which are popular on mobile or exist solely as apps. Those social networks that drive the biggest increases in social engagement on mobile are likely to win for engagement overall.

Breaking Down Time Spent By Network

It’s difficult to measure the amount of time the average active user of a social network spends on any one site because the means to access those sites has become so fragmented — with desktop sites, desktop clients, mobile apps, and mobile sites each serving as entry points.

Also, since new networks have popped up and acquired users so fast, there are few apples-to-apples comparisons in terms of time-spend and usage.

Nonetheless, it's important to try to line up the data points to get a sense of where users are increasingly compelled to stay for a while, post, and interact with the community, and where interest has begun to fall off.

Desktop Social Time-Spend

We know Facebook leads in monthly active users, and it is also where users spend a vast amount of their daily social time.

But other social networks are in a scramble for the remaining share.

Looking at desktop-based time spent on social media, comScore divvied up how U.S. social network engagement broke down by share in December 2012.

• Facebook accounted for an unrivaled 83% share of total time spent on social networking sites.
• The social site that saw the next greatest amount of time spent may come as a surprise — Tumblr took second place, with a 5.7% share of social time-spend.
• Tumblr was three times ahead of the site that saw the next greatest amount of desktop engagement, Pinterest, at 1.9%.
• And Pinterest was already ahead of Twitter and LinkedIn, which were at 1.7% and 1.4%, respectively.
• The "other" category saw a 6.1% share of time spent, more than any network besides Facebook — a further indication of how many different networks are now competing for attention. Networks that have seen fast adoption curves, like Instagram and Snapchat, are included in this "other" category.

It’s critical to remember these figures show the total breakdown of time for the month and are not weighted according to the number of active users each site hosts.

We performed a calculation to see how effective each site is in driving engagement on a per-user basis, based on comScore's data for desktop unique visitors, also for the same month.

Engagement Index: (% Of Monthly Desktop Social Media Time-Spend x 100) / Monthly Desktop Uniques

Working with the numbers, it becomes clear just how successful Facebook is in keeping users glued to the site, but also how effective sites like Tumblr and Pinterest have become in spurring engagement, compared to more talked-about networks like Twitter and LinkedIn.

Here's our Engagement Index rankings for the top five social networks:

1. Facebook, 55.4
2. Tumblr, 18.5
3. Pinterest, 6.57
4. Twitter, 4.17
5. LinkedIn, 3.45

In other words, Facebook is about three times more effective at getting the average user to spend more time on its desktop site as second place Tumblr. But Tumblr, in turn, drives three times higher time-spend on a per-user basis than the No. 3 social network, Pinterest.

In overall penetration terms, however, Tumblr is still far behind the pack.

Only 3% of U.S. Internet users used Tumblr on desktop and mobile in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to GlobalWebIndex, compared to 61% on Facebook, 21% on Twitter, 12% on Pinterest, and 8% on LinkedIn.

Also, as you can see at right, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Tumblr have grown their penetration rates fairly substantially over the course of 2013, and time-spend at the networks also seems to be driving up, as will be discussed more later on.

So there’s a strong chance that if comScore were to do its calculation of time-spend in the country today, all three networks would have succeeded in shaving away some of the aggregate time-spend going to the other networks — including Facebook.

The Other category, with sites like Instagram and Snapchat, is also only getting bigger in terms of usage.

Time-Spend Across Mobile And Desktop

Taking a look at combined desktop and smartphone engagement, comScore, in conjunction with J.P. Morgan, provides insight into time-spend on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and some of the newer social networks.

• U.S. Facebook users spent an average 114 billion minutes on the social network, excluding tablets, compared to 8 billion minutes for Instagram, according to the February 2013 study.
• Twitter was already behind Instagram at 5.33 billion minutes spent in the month, despite about 10 million more monthly active users as Instagram.
• In addition, comScore found that nearly equal amounts of total aggregate time was spent on WhatsApp and Snapchat by their users in the U.S., at 680 million minutes and 620 million minutes, respectively, during the month.

But because the networks have varying audience sizes, this engagement data is much more meaningful if it's viewed on a per-user basis.

Engagement Index: (% Share Of Monthly Desktop & Smartphone Social Media Time-Spend On Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Snapchat x 100) / Total Digital Audience

This calculation is nearly identical to the one we performed above for desktop engagement.

In this case, the data is telling us how relatively successful the networks have been in encouraging time-spend across smartphones, and PCs.

Here are the scores:

1. Facebook, 50.7
2. Instagram, 13.5
3. Twitter, 7.4
4. Snapchat, 6.6
5. WhatsApp, 4.6

The results are interesting for a few reasons.

To begin with, Facebook's advantage over Twitter is not of the same magnitude as it was when desktop-only engagement is considered. On the desktop, Facebook drove 13 times more engagement per-user than Facebook (their indices were 55.4 and 4.17, respectively.)

But across all devices, Facebook outpaces Twitter for per-user engagement by a factor of roughly seven to one. It's still a significant advantage, but not nearly as dramatic. Twitter doesn't look nearly as terrible at driving time-spend relative to Facebook once mobile is factored in.

Secondly, feed-based social networks seem to have an advantage over messaging apps in terms of engagement per-user. Snapchat and WhatsApp are organized primarily around the model of peer-to-peer transmission of quick text and photo messages. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are organized around a news feed or stream loaded with constantly refreshed content from all of one's connections.

News feed-centric social media may seem old hat these days compared to Snapchat's disappearing photos, but they are effective at keeping users glued to their PC and mobile screens.

Mobile Social Time-Spend

Twitter looks even stronger when measuring time-spend on mobile exclusively.

• Nielsen found that in July 2012 time spent on Twitter’s mobile apps and the mobile Web ranked
  second, trailing only Facebook's mobile time-spend.
• Tumblr was not as strong on mobile apps compared to its strength on the desktop. Pinterest beat out Tumblr for app-based time-spend.
• Tumblr was stronger than Pinterest on the mobile Web.

Since that time, according to Tumblr Sales Development Strategist Tyler Pennell, Tumblr has pushed heavily on mobile and focused especially on making its mobile Dashboard publishing experience as strong as it is on the desktop.

Tumblr now says it sees 26.7 million blog posts created on mobile each day, out of 80 million total.

Mobile time-spend has likely grown in tandem.

Pinterest’s uptick last year in terms of time spent on mobile was also phenomenal.

Time spent on Pinterest’s mobile app grew by over 6,000%, according to Nielsen's data, more than 3.5 times faster than growth of its mobile app audience. Meaning, yes, Pinterest is adding more users on mobile, but it is getting its mobile users to stick around for longer still.

How Participation And Activity Are Shaping Up

When social network users log in, they can spend many minutes scrolling their feed, but whether they actually post, comment, like, or share is a separate question. Moreover, user activity is diversifying — activities like posting a video, game playing, and messaging are becoming more popular.

Social engagement is also becoming more difficult to categorize — a site like Snapchat, with its disappearing photo-based communications, has eschewed the traditional scrolling feed (though this is beginning to change); on Pinterest, pinning something to a board can be seen as sharing a photo, distributing content, or both.

Below is a cross-section of the relative stickiness of some of the different kinds of activities across networks.

Photo-Sharing

GlobalWebIndex looked at some of the most common engagement activities on specific social media sites and found that the skew toward photo-sharing cannot be overstated.

Sharing photos was the top activity on Facebook, Google+, and was also extremely popular on 140-character-based Twitter, in terms of total users who participate:

• On Facebook, nearly half of MAUs, 500 million users, shared a photo via the desktop in the third quarter of 2013.
• On Twitter, 188 million did so. Notably, Twitter recently put photos directly in users’ feeds, indicating that the network is actively responding to the way engagement is shaping up on the network and across social media.
• Google+ has nearly 100 million more active users than Twitter, but only beat Twitter for photo-sharing on desktop by a small margin. Two-hundred-million users uploaded and shared photos on Google+'s desktop site.

Other photo-sharing stats from some of the newer social networks include:

• WhatsApp reports that 400 million photos are sent every day over the network, or 12 billion per month.
• Snapchat is already on par, reporting 400 million ‘Snaps’ sent daily.
• Instagram says that 55 million photos are shared on a daily basis. Fewer than one-seventh as many as on either WhatsApp or Snapchat.

The takeaway here is not only that photo-sharing is huge, but messaging services have tremendous power to motivate people to send each other photos.

Sending photos seems even more popular than posting them to a feed like Instagram's.

Posting A Status Update

Posting a "status update," defined as a comment about what one is up to personally, is one of the most essential activities on Facebook and Twitter, according to GlobalWebIndex:

• In the third quarter, 353 million users posted a comment via the desktop about what they were up to on Facebook.
• On Twitter, 152 million did so.

Twitter is doing a better job than Facebook of getting a greater share of its users to update their friends on their day-to-day activities. That makes sense because of Twitter's focus on immediate and real-time information.

This speaks to the engagement challenge Facebook faces as other social networks pop up and attract users toward more specialized forms of social networking.

Twitter also notably was the only network of the three studied by GlobalWebIndex where usage of nearly every activity increased between the first quarter and third quarter of 2013 on all devices, smartphone, tablet, and even desktop. The study asked about 10 different primary social network activities, from commenting on posts to sharing an article link.

At Facebook and Google+ participation in nearly every activity declined on desktop. So, it seems Twitter is addressing its time-spend problem across devices, pushing to keep relevant by making sure more and more of its users participate in activities wherever they access the network.

Also, notably, while mobile social media time has already eclipsed the desktop, far more people still participated in social activities via the desktop across all three networks, compared to the smartphone or tablet.

This held true for all 10 activities, including “liking” a product, brand, or article. In other words, social media use on smartphones and tablets still seems skewed toward passive consumption rather than active contributions.

The Visual Web And Content Creation As Alternative Engagement Drivers

For Tumblr, a post is not a status update; it is something more in-depth — a blog entry that can utilize nearly every form of visual media in a given post, from text to GIFs. The company says that 80 million blog posts are created and posted on a daily basis. Given the amount of time it takes to create a dynamic blog post, alongside the time it takes users to digest these posts, this goes a long way toward explaining why Tumblr users show such high time-spend.

Other social networks, like Snapchat and Instagram, have succeeded at growing users and engagement through a focus on immediacy.

Tumblr offers an alternative model of engagement. Participating on the social network takes a more concerted effort. A similar argument could be made for Pinterest. Users create boards using their own images alongside items from all over the Web, and the emphasis on design creates an implicit stickiness.

As a result, time-spend and traffic on Pinterest and Tumblr have been on a dramatic tear, alongside user growth. Additionally, RJ Metrics looked at Pinterest engagement in February 2012 and found that the site was successfully getting new users to steadily increase their pinning activity in the months that followed opening their account.

Typically, participation is highest for the average new user in the first weeks and then slowly begins to fall.

Pinterest is also looking beyond image-based pinning and allowing users to put up more robust article pins. Pinterest says that 5 million pins per day are to articles.

Already, the site is becoming a popular content sharing forum. ShareThis found that the social network is seeing the fastest growth in publisher content sharing of any social network, even as Facebook and Twitter still account for 75% of social shares.

And Facebook continues making moves to become an even more important site for publisher content sharing, and a more compelling network for users. The social giant recently changed its algorithm purportedly to give users more of what they want in their News Feed — content. Publishers have seen a spike in traffic as a result of the change.

Finally, LinkedIn is the success story for content sharing. It ranked second in ShareThis' study of content-sharing growth.

Engagement on LinkedIn trailed other social networks for a long time, as people primarily used the site when looking for a job or seeking out a job candidate. These activities do not exactly lend themselves to regular visits — at least one hopes not.

But LinkedIn has been pushing engagement in three big ways lately — making itself a content destination, where users log in regularly to hear what influencers and people in their network are talking about; upping its mobile presence, so that it doesn’t lose out on the increasingly mobile side of social engagement; and encouraging Groups where people are more likely to share content suited to people with similar professional goals.

In the first quarter of 2013, LinkedIn saw this strategy pay off. The company reported that page views on desktop and mobile combined rose 63% year-over-year. Desktop views alone were 11.1 billion for the quarter.

According to the company, 200 conversations happen per minute across LinkedIn Groups and more than 8,000 Groups are created each week.

Moreover, as anyone who's received a steadily rising number of LinkedIn notifications alerting them to a new endorsement can attest, there is no question that the number of people clicking around on LinkedIn has increased.

Status updates and photo-sharing may never be as popular on LinkedIn as elsewhere, but the company has come up with other ways to boost activity, time-spend, and the value proposition for users.

THE BOTTOM LINE

• Time spent on social networking now leads all other Internet activities, but competition for that share of time has also increased.
• Mobile is now the place where social media users spend a bulk of their networking time.
• The amount of time spent on a social network no longer corresponds to the relative size of the social audience. Tumblr is now the No. 2 social network in the U.S. for time spend.
• "Pinning,""snapping," and engaging in Groups are all rewriting what it means to be "active" on a social network. For now, photo-sharing remains the most popular activity.

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