Data and digital marketing blog

Grow your blog – data, audiences and insights

We have a finite amount of attention and in today’s growing connectedness and always-on lifestyle our attention is in hot demand. Brands, businesses, marketers, and devices are all trying to score more of our attention.

Did you know that on average humans around the world spend roughly 140 minutes per day absorbed in different social media platforms? This means that over a year the average human will spend 51 100 minutes absorbed in this world. That’s more than 850 hours!

Let’s take a moment for that to sink in before we unpack things further. So, what does this time usage look like in comparison to some of our other daily activities?

Here are a few calculations:

  • Total number of hours in a year – 24 hours x 365 days = 8760 hours
  • Total amount of average time spent on social media – 51 100 minutes divided by 60 = 851 hours
  • 851 divided by 8760 = 9,7% of our time over the entire year is spent on social media

To put this into perspective. If we sleep for 6 hours a day, we spend 25% of our time over the year sleeping.

Some of these numbers may have blown your mind; the reality is that many individuals actually spend significantly more time on social media than the average.

But what does this all mean? And why is it relevant to consider when putting a plan in place to grow a blog’s digital presence?

In today’s digital age we spend a lot of our time connected to our phones, browsing the internet, and in social media feeds. Our attention is a finite resource, this concept is explained well by the attention economy.

Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. Put simply by Matthew Crawford, “Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.”

Why is this relevant? Well, we are in world that produces a phenomenal amount of data. In 2014 there were 2.4 billion internet users. That number grew to 3.4 billion by 2016, and in 2017, 300 million internet users were added. In June 2019 there were more than 4.4 billion internet usersThis is an 83% increase in the number of people using the internet in just five years! Read all about the amount of data created each day on the internet and the drastic growth in user numbers.

In managing the CN&CO blog and social media channels, these are some of the areas that I take into consideration, as we too are entering into the bid for your attention. Thinking and learning about the broader digital economy means that I can explore different ways to distribute the content through social media. You need to apply you mind when working on social media. It is not simply a one size fits all approach.

You may be familiar with the saying that “content is king”. While this may have been true a few years ago, there has been a shift. Distribution is now king/queen. Social media offers a great distribution channel and it is definitely something that you should explore before starting a subscription service for your blog… we get enough emails in our inbox as it is.

By being in tune with the digital space you can also meet your readers where they are spending large parts of their time. Having said this, social media is changing and I will be keeping a close eye on this as we head towards 2020.

Being aware of the broader context is key. This awareness, combined with consistent posts, data analytics and regular content, has allowed us to develop the CN&CO blog into a diverse digital property.

Happy blogging!

P.S. A tip when producing or conceptualising content: People like stories about people.