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. 

Blogging replaced by Vlogging?

A blogger noticed that views have declined rapidly. Their stats (immediately below, with permission) are for 12 months and total in excess of 6k so let's remove the Singapore views for this exercise and we are left with a total of well over 1,000 views a year.

Total blog views in 30 days (above) = 81

As an ongoing average x 12 months = 972 per year

- OR -

removing Singapore = 8 per month, let's say 100 per year 

(less than 10% of the previous year)

Based in the UK, the blogger is surprised that

THERE ARE NO UK VIEWS DURING THE PAST 30 DAYS. 

Time to check The BPc blogs and see how they compare 

Blog 1 https://thebpcuk.blogspot.com/ 

Over 1,000 views in the past 30 days, almost 13,000 views in the past 12 months - steady average. 

Here's the odd bit - just under 50% of these views came from The Isle of Man!! Really, Google?

Blog 2 https://myportfolioltd.blogspot.com/ 
Over 1,000 views in the past 30 days, almost 23,000 views in the past 12 months - declining average? 
More than 90% of these were almost equally divided between The USA and Singapore.

Other blogging hosts 

Wordpress & Tumblr have not, in the past, been as successful as blogger/blogspot. Indeed, we struggle to make any headway whatsoever with the latter. 

YouTube

The BPc's YouTube channel has had almost 3.5k views in the past 30 days and almost 18k in the past year. This indicates that views have improved and, on further analysis, we see that visits in the second half of the year increased phenomenally: 

Our conclusion is that... we don't know the reasons for any of these fluctuating stats. We'd be delighted if anyone can explain in simple terms. 

Other host  for social media video include Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Good luck out there! 

So this is Christmas

 ...and what have we done? 

We're glad you asked! We've been updating and maintaining clients' websites and managing their social media. We've also created a couple of websites, proof-read books for publication, created scripts and written a few blog posts. We are also still consulting for a couple of companies. 

We've played with AI and concluded that it's good for some basic writing but falls short of creativity and substance. We've tried generated images with AI but are not enthralled with the results, although our research continues. 

As most of our work is desk-based, you'd be hard pushed to describe it as exciting, but much of it is interesting. 

What we dislike, though, are advances in technology that make us step backwards because, while it improves on what it can offer, it falls far short on reliability. We've been around long enough to remember when users told the machines what to do, not the other way round - perhaps science-fiction is not so far-fetched, after all.

Have a great Christmas! 

IONOS / 1&1 Support

Today is the turn of IONOS (1&1) - and it isn't about the irritating woman on their ads - it's the difficulty of finding out how to get support via email or chat for a written trail, rather than a telephone call. 

There are some good reasons to use IONOS, including their introductory offers for hosting and SSL certificates. However, their support options are a major issue. We've been having problems for the past week or so, which are... 

• On October 3rd, we received notification of a client's hosting renewal, This was no longer required so we set the renewal to cancel; 
• The confirmation wasn't clear so we checked with 'chat' who confirmed that it was cancelled. We copy/pasted this conversation for possible future reference; 
• Last week, payment was taken for renewal. 

Since then, we have tried several times daily to contact 'chat' with this result EVERY SINGLE TIME 

So, to summarise, currently there is no 'chat' facility, they have also removed their 'raise a ticket' facility and all reference to all email addresses (we searched the site). Notification emails from them are all no-reply.

Next, we searched through our emails and found previous emails from support and billing so we sent our query to these addresses, with no luck. However, we did find an email address on the internet for their cloud support and actually received a reply, which was: 

Hi,

You are here on the IONOS Cloud support, and you are a IONOS Core customer.
Please contact them:

support@ionos.de
0049 (0721) 170 555

Their support is now only available from Germany?  Unbelievable. So I contacted them and here is their standard response... 

Hallo,

vielen Dank für Ihre E-Mail.

Ihre Zufriedenheit mit unseren Produkten liegt uns am Herzen! Daher ist uns Ihre Anfrage sehr wichtig.

Wir werden uns innerhalb der nächsten 48 bis 72 Stunden in einer persönlichen E-Mail um Ihre Anfrage kümmern. In Ausnahmefällen kann es auch mal länger dauern, bitte haben Sie dann etwas Geduld mit uns.

Unser Tipp für Sie: Antworten auf viele Kundenanfragen finden Sie jederzeit in unserem Hilfe-Center unter https://ionos.de/hilfe .

Für weitere Fragen stehen wir Ihnen unter der Telefonnummer 0721 170 555 rund um die Uhr - zu Ihren Festnetzkonditionen - zur Verfügung.

Basically, they usually respond within 3 days. 

What a farce! 

UPDATE. There's a Twitter account for UK support - message has now been sent to them... 

FINAL UPDATE (hopefully). It took a while but, by various means, we received a response from IONOS Support, asking for proof of cancellation confirmation, as they could not find it in their files. This was sent* and, almost instantly, we received confirmation that cancellation has been activated. 

*To vindicate our insistence of a written support trail, how would things have worked out if we had only had a verbal exchange? The difficulty with finding an email contact address far outweighed the difficulty we may have had in proving that the service was confirmed as cancelled.

UH-OH ANOTHER UPDATE Pleased to report that the refund has been applied to the account. An account that will not be used, going forward. So we now need to get back to them to request that the refund is returned to the card from which it was taken. However this is resolved, we'll post it here. 

REFUND RECEIVED

Case closed.

Thanks, IONOS.

Oh, Google, Give us a Break!

Have you tried editing the details of your Google Maps entry? It has become so complicated now! 

Also, did you know that Bing accesses the Google Maps data rather than bother with their own? So getting an accurate Google Maps Entry is important. 

One of our clients has moved their head office and they noticed that their entries on Google and Bing are out of date. They are unaware of having an account for it (and we couldn't find one) so they've asked us to set one up and manage it for them. That's the easy bit! 

Listed below are some of the hoops we're having to go through.

Having edited the details, we were presented with this message:

So we hit the Get Verified button. This used to generate a postcard with a pin code being sent to the address given. It wasn't a great idea because it wasn't addressed to a specific person and larger companies often just binned it. However, Google seems to have gone too far in another direction... Read on to see what happens now.

Well, let's see what the other options may require...

Is that it? Contact support or Verify Later? Oh, well. Let's look at the video tips.

We know that there are no other verification options so we have asked the client (whose new office is 3 hours drive from here) if they can provide a video. Meanwhile, they are listed on Google Maps at the wrong address in the wrong city. That can't be good for Google's integrity. 

If anyone finds an easier way to Get Verified and have the correct address information shown on Google and Bing, please let us know!

AI Images from Microsoft

Returning to the topic of AI I tried out MicroSoft Create to see how useful the results would be. 

First, I asked the software to generate an image of '5 men and 3 women sitting in a circle':

• It gave me 5 people (so it can't do maths);
• They were in business attire;
• They were all aged in their 30s.

Not a bad start so I refined the description to '5 men and 3 women, casual clothing, aged 40 to 60, sitting in a circle:

• 5 people in one image, 9 people in another!
• dressed casually;
• they were mostly silver-haired and very sociable.

Finally, I tried again, adding the word 'watercolour', hoping that this would blur details of the people:

• Create was still unable to count to give me the number of men and women I wanted but the image I chose was acceptable as a partial group for the purpose I had in mind.

I was still puzzled about the number of people, so I put in the number 8 - below are the descriptions and the resulting images:

Quite exasperating.

By adding the word 'watercolour' there was a slightly different result:

Each those groups of images included one group of 8 people. However, is it really AI? I'm left wondering if these images are generated on request or, quite likely, are found in an image database, meaning that the description is just a database search.

So... I did a reverse-image search and, to be fair, whilst there were many similarly structured images, I couldn't find the exact same one, therefore it seems that Create is at least partially generating AI. Free and fast, it's definitely worth a go.

I'll try another online AI image creator next time and compare results.

AI and Metaverse in Business - what does it mean?

The world of digital marketing has undergone a seismic change since the emphasis on Artificial Intelligence (AI) by technology giants, such as Google, Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft. 

Website analytics and optimisation have to be virtually scrapped and regenerated to take account of the trends that are here to stay for the near future. Companies that have recognised this are the ones at the top of (for example) Google searches. Posts on social media would also benefit from using AI to reach a more targeted audience.

The other buzzword is the Metaverse, originally associated with Meta and also Microsoft. It is now taking on a life of it's own. The concept is like a tadpole who expects to metamorphose into a frog but could become a prince. Or... 

"The metaverse can be defined as a simulated digital environment that uses augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and blockchain, along with concepts from social media, to create spaces for rich user interaction mimicking the real world."

For the 'gamer' generation, this will seem quite normal. 

So how can SMEs catch up?

First, ensure that your website is using Google Analytics' latest update which includes AI options. Second, consider using AI to create some of your content for both your website and social media. Third, Ensure that videos are a major part of your digital marketing strategy.

There are some companies that are optimising their websites for voice search activation, for the growing number of people who 'talk' to their devices rather than type into a search engine. 

Creating content with AI

AI is more intelligent than a plain old robot so, when used properly, you won't end up with the same text as all your competitors. And don't forget - you should always check the article to ensure that it says what you want it to. It's editable by you. too (in which case, have the edited version checked for errors by another party).

A popular choice is to use ChatGPT but, at the time of writing, there are some issues. The following was generated with toolbaz.com (free, online) by inserting the title:
Discuss Using AI for SEO

As the internet continues to evolve, so does the way we search for information. As the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent, it has become an invaluable tool for search engine optimization (SEO). AI can be used to improve the quality of search engine results and to give users better content. AI can help understand and interpret complex user queries, identify relevant content and identify patterns in user behavior. AI can also help with keyword optimization, content optimization, and link building. AI can also be used to analyze user behavior, such as click-through data and the number of searches done for a particular topic. This data can then be used to create more targeted content that is more likely to be found by users. AI can also be used to identify trends in user behavior and create content that is more likely to be seen and clicked on. AI can also be used to improve the speed and accuracy of web page indexing by reducing the amount of time it takes for a page to be indexed. AI can also be used to optimize the structure of a website, making it easier for search engine algorithms to crawl and index a website's content. AI can also be used to create personalized content for users based on their past searches and interests. AI can also be used to automate the process of content creation by generating content based on user queries. AI can also be used to monitor the performance of a website and make changes to make it more search engine friendly. AI can also be used to identify new opportunities for SEO and to create more effective strategies for SEO.

That text was created instantly. Obviously, it has been generated for an American audience therefore some spellings may need your attention.

It's accurate but, in my opinion, it's s bit generically bland and far too wordy. Still, it's free and a great starting point - writers often struggle when faced with a blank page.

We'll be writing more on other aspects of AI and keeping it simple. We hope it helps!