Let’s get our statistics hat on.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American watches about 2.8 hours of television per day, or 84 hours per month, accounting for about half of all non-working, leisure time. That’s a lot.
In the face of figures like that, it’s easy to forget that this number is decreasing, and has been for a decade as video games and the internet take up larger portions of our media and entertainment diets. But, let’s look at this trend relative to what is going on in the world of social media. Analyses on social media usage aren’t exactly where they need to be yet. Some sources indicate that time spent on social sites is somewhere in the 5-6 hour per person per month range. That seems low.
Let’s look at Facebook: With an estimated 150 million American members (representing a 43% share of the U.S. online audience), Facebook owns the lion’s share of time spent on social media. They estimate that there are 700 billion minutes per month spent on their service, or about 11.6 billion hours. Thirty percent of that is from U.S.-based users, which translates to about 3.5 billion hours. Knowing that the population in the U.S. over 15 is about 285 million, that’s just over 12 hours per person per month. And, this is just Facebook. We don’t have data for time users spend on other online social activities, like tweeting, commenting on reviews and writing blogs for example.
How might this change over time, and what will it mean?
Just for giggles, let’s make some questionable, but fun, assumptions:
- Let’s say the television number decreases with any incremental increase in social media usage.
- Let’s also say that other social activities combined are an incremental 10% of what Facebook usage is (conservative?)
- Lastly, let’s say that, in the U.S., Facebook usage over the next 12-18 months will increase relative to the projected growth of the platform, or about 20%.
This puts social media usage at around 16 hours per person per month, and brings television viewing down to about 80 hours per person per month. The average American will still watch television about 5 times more than they will be using social tools.
This is interesting not for the relative ratio it provides, but what the larger trend implies. As a marketer, a 5% decrease in television engagement over 12 months seems like a pretty big deal. Users are migrating to channels that are more interactive, and where they are more empowered. The gap between TV and social media channels will continue to shrink and, as it does, more and more consumers will be spending their precious leisure time as consumers and creators of content that is largely outside the influence of marketers.
The consumer will be more difficult to reach through traditional communication methods, and businesses will need to innovate in social channels where the consumer might have a hard time yielding the floor.
