Why do we bother?

Back at work after the summer, I find myself in need of some reassurance that there is still work to be done, helping the not for profit sector with digital development. 

So I take a look to see the latest figures on how strongly the UK has bought into digital media. And I'm astonished by what I find:

• 51.4 million of the UK's population of 62.3 million are now internet users. In 2007 the figure was 38.5 million, so it's definitely still rising - and pretty fast.

The media paints social media as being predominantly a young person's game but the stats tell a different story. Of the UK's 48.6 million adults, an astonishingly high number use social media:

• 37.4million adults use Facebook regularly
• More than half of the UK’s pensioners are now on Facebook
• 32.1 million adults use YouTube regularly
• 15.5 million adults are on Twitter
•  7.9 million adults are on LinkedIn
•  6.7 million adults are on Flickr. 

The other noteworthy development is how much the use of mobile devices has increased. 39% of adults in the UK now own a smartphone. And 42% of these smartphone users use the phones as their primary point of internet access (for web, social media and email). This growth is incredibly rapid: in the 18 months to January 2012, the volume of data consumed by mobile devices in the UK doubled. This is clearly the space to watch. 

And I feel duly reassured that there is plenty still to do.

Read more about this for yourself:

• http://www.internetworldstats.com/eu/uk.htm
• http://digital-fingerprint.co.uk/2012/01/social-media-in-the-uk-statistics/
• http://digital-stats.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/data-on-uk-smartphone-usage.html