Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service, enabling registered users on the platform to read and post short messages named tweets. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters and users are also able to upload multimedia such as photos or short videos. Tweets are posted to a publicly available profile or can be sent as direct messages to other users. Twitter is one of the most popular social networks worldwide. Part of the appeal is the ability of users to follow any other user with a public profile, enabling users to interact with high profiles persons who might regularly post and engage with audiences on the social media site. As of the fourth quarter of 2016, the microblogging service averaged at 319 million monthly active users. At the beginning of 2016, Twitter had reached 310 monthly active users per quarter (Statista, 2016).
YouTube is the most popular video-sharing site on the internet today. In an average month, 8 out of 10 18-49-year-olds watch YouTube (WordStream, 2017). The total number of people who use YouTube is over 1 billion with 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube by over 30 million visitors every single day. As such, the service has an enormous reach for content-hungry youths. However, most viewers will decide to either watch a video or skip a video within the first 10 seconds. This places a great amount of importance on the introduction of a particular video.
Sources:
- Number of monthly active Twitter users worldwide from 1st quarter 2010 to 4th quarter 2016 (in millions). Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/. Accessed on 20 March 2017.
- 40 Essential Social Media Marketing Statistics for 2017. Retrieved from http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/01/05/social-media-marketing-statistics. Accessed on 20 March 2017.