Mediakix calculated average time spent per day on YouTube (40 minutes), Facebook (35), Snapchat (25), Instagram (15) and Twitter (one) and projected those figures out over a lifetime, arriving at a total of five years and four months.
Social media use trailed only watching television, at seven years and eight months, and it came in well ahead of eating/drinking, grooming, socializing and the necessary evil of doing laundry.
Mediakix said in a blog post introducing its infographic:
Social media advertising spend is projected to reach nearly $36 billion globally in 2017, with the U.S. and Canada spending the most and eclipsing $12.5 billion in 2016 (eMarketer). In 2015, time spent on mobile applications (not necessarily social media mobile apps, but including them) exceeded time spent watching TV for U.S. consumers (TechCrunch). Growth on many of the top social media platforms continues to rise as each network rolls out new features and functionalities to better compete for users’ daily time and engagement (e.g., Facebook video and Facebook Live, Snapchat Spectacles, Instagram Stories, etc.).
As such, the number of people using social is not only increasing, but it is accompanied by how much time people are spending each day on social media. Just on Facebook’s suite of owned apps alone (Facebook, Instagram and Messenger—excluding WhatsApp), its users are spending an average of 50 minutes each day. In order to see how much the average person will ultimately spend on social media, we calculated the time spent across today’s most popular social media platforms and projected this figure across an entire lifetime.
