If social networks were countries, which would they be?

If Facebook were a country, it would be substantially bigger than China. The size of Facebook's user base translates to around one in seven of the global population using it each month - around 1.65 billion people.

The role of digital technology in breaking down physical borders is one of the many trends in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. As social media continues to open up new opportunities for businesses and societies, how do today's networks compare?

Facebook 
According to Statista, Facebook had over 1.65 billion monthly active users in the first quarter of 2016. The number of monthly active mobile users also passed 1.5 billion in the same quarter. China's population, by comparison, is around 1.37 billion. 

WhatsApp 
While not technically a social network, it's worth including the messaging giant in this list due to the 1 billion-plus people using it each month. Monthly active users isn't the best metric for measuring messaging apps (you either use them daily-ish or not at all) but the MAU figure has grown impressively from 700 million in January 2015 to 1 billion now, putting it within sight of India, which has a population of 1.25 billion. The messaging app also handles over 64 billion messages and 600 million photos each day.

Top 15 countries by population, and the social media giants

Instagram 

The photo- and video-sharing app reported over 400 million monthly active users worldwide in September 2015, just ahead of the US population of 319 million. Nearly all of these are engaging with the service via the mobile app, although there is also a desktop version. The number of Instagram users in the US is predicted to pass 106 million by 2018. 

Twitter 

The network for those happy to keep their musings to 140 characters or less, Twitter has over 305 million monthly active users, with around 80% living outside the US. The social network upset the apple cart last year somewhat with the introduction of a tailored algorithm to order tweets, moving away from a live feed, which upset some users. Growth has slowed, as well as the company's stock price, but it's still the go-to place for breaking news alerts and a glimpse of the world in real-time. 

Google+ 

Google doesn't particularly like talking about its MAUs, and it's fair to say it isn't the obvious destination when people want to share something about themselves. At last count, the network had over 300 million users, which would make it bigger than Indonesia, and a tad smaller than the USA. 

LinkedIn 

LinkedIn's monthly active user base is growing robustly, with around 100 million people currently using the site each month. Over 400 million have an account, however. The social network generates revenue from 3 areas - hiring solutions, advertising revenue, and premium subscriptions. The 100 million MAUs puts it just behind the Philippines in terms of size. 

Snapchat 

The newest member of the social media giants, it was reported back in January last year that Snapchat had over 100 million monthly active users, which would make it around the same size as Ethiopia. However, data is hard to come by, with some other sources suggesting the figure could be as high as 200 million.

The Great Marketing Experiment – PPC Update

You may have read my post a few weeks ago about the post about experimenting with PPC adverts. During that post, I spent just under £300 on different forms of pay-per-click advertising. I didn’t get much out of that £300, but I did learn a lot.

I ended the post by saying that we were going to try and use Outbrain and Reddit to try and drum up sales for our table tennis bats we sell on Amazon in Germany. The bats are very popular in the UK and USA but we have been finding it difficult to get traction and sales in non-English-speaking countries.

Outbrain isn’t your standard advertising platform. You can’t buy PPC adverts that lead directly to products, rather your adverts need to lead to blog posts or articles. For a week, we ran an Outbrain campaign where we paid to drive traffic to an article that is very favourable towards our bats: Der beste Tischtennisschläger für Anfänger.

Hopefully, people would read the article, go to Amazon and buy our bats.

This was a very good experiment because we could very easy to track how the adverts performed. Our sales in Germany were so low that any increase would be obvious and would clearly be linked to Outbrain. If we made more profit normal and that extra covered the cost of the adverts, the experiment would be a success. Otherwise, it would be back to the drawing board.

To work this out we took the sales from the previous month and calculated what the average gross profit per day was. We could then compare this to the profit we made in the week we spent money on Outbrain advertising.

Gross Profit: The amount of money we made when taking into account all expenses but not including what we spent on advertising at Outbrain.

For the month before we started advertising: 24 Feb to 24 March, we averaged €18.97 (£15.17) gross profit per day. 

I set a bid of 5p a click and a maximum budget of £25 a day. Here’s a screenshot from the Outbrain dashboard showing it how got on:

£169.79 spent for 3,426 clicks. £24.26 a day, slightly below budget.

For the week we were advertising: 24 March to 31 March, we averaged €79.35 (£63.48) gross profit per day. That’s £48.31 extra gross profit.

That is quite an increase. And it was definitely linked to the Outbrain advertising. 4 out of the 7 days had higher sales than on any day in the previous month.

What is great is that the amount of extra gross profit was more than the cost of advertising. Over the whole week, we spent £169.79 in advertising and made an extra £338.16. Once we take out the cost of the adverts we still made an extra £182.32.

This is very very good. Especially as the results should be scalable. Every £1 we spent on advertising led to £1.93 of gross profit (93p net profit). If we set our budget higher then the profit should scale proportionally. £500 a day on advertising should get us £965 gross profit.

Over the next few weeks and months we will be aggressively scaling this advertising in Germany, and also launching similar schemes in the other non-English speaking Amazon territories: France, Italy, Spain and Mexico.

For once, this was a very successful experiment that beat all our expectations!