The third IPA TouchPoints Hub Survey has recently been released,  describing a week in the life of a representative sample of the GB adult population during late 2009/early 2010.

As well as revealing that people watch 3.7 hours of television per day, listen to the radio for 2.1 hours and access the Internet for 1.8 hours per day – the survey is full of interesting insights into the way Internet use and social media are becoming increasingly important to people’s lives.

Digital trends

• 75% of adults use the Internet in a week now, rising from 53% in TouchPoints2.
• Daily Internet usage has increased 38% in the same period, up from 1.3 hours to 1.8 hours. This increase is greatest in the evening and primarily driven by the growth in social networking.
• Growth in Internet use is across all age groups but greatest for 15-24s (+43%).
• Internet use in general has a slight male bias and is more heavily biased towards ABC1s. It also has a quite marked regional bias towards London and the South East with the rest of the country being much lighter Internet users of all types.
• Email accounts for a 20% share of all Internet activity, next largest activity is using the Internet for work which takes a 16% share.
• Although, still at the 1-2% share levels, the time spent consuming media online has also grown substantially; listening to radio/podcasts is up by 166%, looking at newspaper websites by 61% and watching online television by 216%.
• 16% of all adults and 34% of 15-24s use their mobile phones to access the Internet each week.

Social media trends

• The time spent social networking has risen by 113%, increasing its share of Internet activity to 11%.
• 37% of adults use social networks each week — this group is particularly skewed towards 15-24s, and those either still studying or working full-time and also has a slight female and ABC1 bias.
• The incidence of social networking also has a strong regional bias towards London and the South East: with the notable exception of the North West, the rest of the country are much lighter social networkers.
• Social networking takes place throughout the whole day but peak time for people to social network is between 6.30pm and 10pm in the evening.
• 35% of all adults claim to use Facebook each week — up from 16% in 2008. For 15-24s Facebook’s weekly reach is 79% – up from 39% in 2008.
• Only 4% of adults claim to use Twitter once a week or more whilst the comparative weekly reach figure for Linkedin is 1.4%.