💥Social Media Use Declines, Yet TikTok Leads Platform Popularity

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Meltwater and We Are Social have released Digital 2024: April Statshot, a quarterly update on social media and digital trends worldwide. The report highlights the global Internet adoption figure, with over two-thirds of the world's population now online, marking a 3.4% annual increase in internet users. At a local level, Australia ranks among the top nations for paying for digital content, especially video and music, and has one of the highest percentages of gambling app users.Australians are more likely to worry about their privacy and are more likely than others in other countries to decline cookie use. While overall, social media use has declined, TikTok still leads the way for platform use. The power of search and organic activity outweighs paid search, and Gen Z connection over doom scrolling is highlighted.Australia ranks among the top 5 nations for internet users paying for digital content monthly, with 74.7% engaging in such transactions. Streaming video popularity is high, with 94.2% of Australian internet users watching TV via streaming services. 45.7% of Australian users aged 16 to 64 pay for a TV or movie streaming service each month, compared to a global average of 31.0%. Similarly, 36.9% pay for streaming music services (compared to a global average of 22.5%).Online gambling habit is high, with 17.6% of Australian users having one of the highest percentages of online gambling or betting website or app users. Mobile payment adoption is also high, with 35.7% using platforms like Apple Pay, surpassing the global average of 24.1%. Ownership of smartwatches continues to increase, with Australia sitting in the top 14 of the 55 countries on the list, with 29.1% of them having a smartwatch.Social media usage in Australia has seen a decline in average user time over the past three months, with an average daily time spent on social media being 1 hour and 54 minutes compared to a global average of 2:20. The share of time spent on social media as a percentage of online time for Australians was 31%, compared to a worldwide average of 35.4%. Platform preferences vary significantly by age and gender, with younger women more likely to prefer Instagram over TikTok, while younger men also show a strong affinity for Instagram.Australia is among the bottom seven countries on the list when it comes to using social media as a source of news, with 27.3%. TikTok dominance is evident in the average amount of time active users spend on different platforms’ apps on Android phones in a month, with Australia ranking 5th in hours and minutes. Globally, Twitter stands out as being the exception to the decline in social media use with a notable increase in user activity. LinkedIn ranks 2nd in the list, and Reddit is third, behind Canada and the US, and just ahead of Iceland and Ireland, who all see eligible reach rates in excess of 30%.In terms of digital ads, organic and paid search drive significantly more mobile traffic compared to desktop traffic. Paid search is more effective on mobile, contributing 0.86% of mobile traffic to top mobile domains versus 0.32% to top desktop domains. Organic social traffic outweighs paid social traffic by a ratio of roughly 250 to 1, and organic social typically drives around 20 times more traffic than paid social.Gen Z is the most active demographic on search engines, adopting new search behaviors, particularly social search. Email usage is more likely among this age group, with 75.9% using email over online music platforms. Brand engagement on websites is also higher among younger users, with a greater emphasis on social connection over passive video consumption.

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