Connecting online joins the mainstream
TORONTO — One in three anglophone Canadians says not a single day goes by without checking into their social media feeds.
It’s one of many social networking statistics compiled in a new report by the Media Technology Monitor, based on surveys conducted in the fall with 4,001 anglophone Canadians.
Almost seven in 10 Internet users said they were regular social media users, logging on at least once a month. That figure was up by about six per cent compared to 2011.
Those numbers didn’t surprise Aimee Morrison, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, who researches digital culture.
“It’s becoming a mainstream part of how we get the business of life accomplished and you’re at a disadvantage increasingly if you don’t do it,” says Morrison.
“I think social media is hitting a tipping point in a way that cellphones did in the later part of the 1990s, where we’ve moved from the stage where it was something that the early adopters did and then the hipsters did and then the kids did.”
About 63 per cent of social media users said they read Facebook posts, tweets and/ or LinkedIn updates every single day.
Facebook remains far and away the most popular social network. About 63 per cent of Internet users and 93 per cent of social media users said they’re on Facebook.
While Twitter gets a lot of media hype and is growing rapidly, it’s not all that commonly used in Canada, according to MTM’s numbers. Less than one in five Internet users said they were on Twitter in the last month, although those numbers had grown from just 10 per cent in 2011.
“Probably in the press it looks like more people are on Twitter than actually are on Twitter,” said Morrison, who noted the stats were in line with usage of the social network among her graduate students.
“They didn’t think it was relevant to them or some had concerns about privacy ... they were worried it might be held against them if they did it wrong.”
About 12 per cent of Internet users said they used LinkedIn at least once a month in 2011. The figure was up to 18 per cent in 2012.