Americans Spend Over 2 Billion Hours On Social Media Per Month

It's really not a surprise when you're told that people spend a lot of time on social media. We all know that Facebook has over a billion users, and that all these statistics that get thrown around of how many photos users share on social networking sites are just a fancy way of saying, "people are using social media." However, it turns out that Americans are collectively spending over two billion hours on social media, every month.

In its annual Social Media Report, Nielsen says that Americans spent a collective 121 billion minutes on social media websites in July alone, which is up from 88 billion the year before. 121 billion minutes equates to just over 230,000 years, which means if we split that time equally amongst every American, that would be about 13 minutes per person per day.

Of course, not everyone in America uses social media — Facebook alone has around 150 million active users in the US according to the report, and there are a total of around 212 million Americans using social media as we speak, compared to the current total US population of 312 million. It's also very possible that a lot of social media accounts are probably duplicates or multiple accounts for one person. So, more realistically, people are probably spending a lot more than just 13 minutes surfing Facebook and Twitter every day. Specifically, if we took those 121 billion minutes and split them equally amongst the 212 million social media users in the US, that would be approximately 19 minutes per person per day, on average.

These are just rough estimates obviously, and not every single social media user only spends 19 minutes per day browsing the sites, but the total 121 billion minutes makes sense no doubt. Furthermore, Nielsen reported that, on average, users spend roughly 20% of their time online on a computer browsing social media, while on mobile devices, users spend around 30% of their time surfing the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ on their tiny screens.