Social media use in Finland

Since it will take some time still before my thesis will be public I chose to share some side products that have been created along the process.  

Here is a time series illustrating social media use in Finland in 2011-2014. I have created this illustration for my dissertation already in last December, but thought it might be as well useful here on the blog. I have compiled this information from the statistics of Statistics Finland.

The statistics show that use of SNSs is common in Finland: over half of the population engages with them. Almost all young people and adults and nearly half of Finns in the 45–54 age group keep company with SNSs. Those in older age groups are not that active in the SNS sphere, although a steady increase is seen in those groups too. Overall, the increase in use in every age group has been significant in recent years.

The graph illustrates not only the latter trend of steady increase but also how strongly age affects the trend. Interestingly all age groups are at a distinct level in their engagement with SNSs (reflected by the figure’s separate, non-overlapping lines).

There is a noticeable gap between those 35–44 and those 45–54 that points to younger age groups being more involved with SNSs than older ones are. Since the youngest group is approaching saturation (100%) in prevalence of SNS use, a future version of this graph is going to look different. Presumably, other age groups’ SNS use levels will reach the levels of younger age groups. With a US time series, Pew Internet shows similar patterns between age groups.

I have also been commenting on similar statistics aqcuaired by Yle and Taloustutkimus in Yle TV News in January 2015.