There’s an enormous amount of content being produced across social media every day – take, for example, the 350,000 tweets sent per minute globally. But given such a voluminous mass of content, it’s difficult to gain valuable insights into what’s cutting through the noise.

The fastest growing demographic on Twitter

Surprisingly, it’s not the young movers and shakers you might expect. On Twitter, the fastest growing demographic is the 55-64 year age bracket, which increased by 79 per cent between 2012 and 2013.

What this means is you can’t discount Twitter as a social media platform and as part of your social strategy if you’ve got a product that might appeal to this demographic. And it’s a similar case across Facebook and Google+ too, wherein on Facebook the 45-54 year age bracket jumped 46 per cent between 2012-13. A social media strategy that spans all available platforms (within your constraints of time and budget) is obviously desirable, given the ability of social media to cut through multiple demographics, including older age brackets.

LinkedIn gains two new members a second

Every second, two new people join LinkedIn, making it one of the fastest-growing social media platforms around. That’s particularly exciting for businesses because the audience of LinkedIn is extremely business-focused – giving you opportunities to network and pitch to those you know may be interested from the beginning.

This is also significant because LinkedIn Pulse offers an exciting way to reach masses of people and develop the profile of key employees within your business. As LinkedIn membership grows, having a library of Pulse content and new publications on a regular basis is a recipe for slow-growth success.

Almost 200 million Facebook users are mobile only

We know that people aren’t just consuming their content on a home PC anymore. They’re getting it fresh through their mobile, tablet, or similar device. But what may be more surprising is that 189 million Facebook users exclusively use their mobile to access the social media platform, whether that be through their browser or the dedicated mobile app.

What that means is that you always have to be shaping and designing content with mobile as the lowest common denominator – optimise your content for mobile. An enormous number of users are accessing content through a device, so you want to ensure that they’re catered for – that means snappy copy, responsive websites, and optimised images and multimedia. If you do it the other way around – designing for PC without considering mobile – you risk alienating a large portion of your potential site visitors.