Social media trivia quiz

Social media is woven through the fabric of our society. Many of us use social media every day. Twenty years ago newspapers set the news agenda of the day, and television filled our free time. Now Ofcom has found that half of us get our news from social media.

But, how well do you know the world of social media? We thought we’d find out with a fun quiz which, if nothing else, will make you the social media expert in your pub quiz team. Social media trivia quiz questions:

1: In 2019, how many people were using social media, worldwide?

2: In which year did Facebook pass one billion users?

3: Which entrepreneur’s tweet has been retweeted more than any other?

4: What was the first video posted on YouTube called?

5: In which year did Facebook release its ‘Reactions’ emojis?

6: Twitter started by allowing 140 characters. How many does it allow now?

7: Which celebrity has the most Instagram followers?

8: What is the surname of Tom, co-founder of MySpace?

9: Which British social media platform did ITV buy in 2005?

10: How many people downloaded the TikTok app in 2019?

Social media trivia quiz answers:

1: 3.8 billion people were using social media in 2019, according to We Are Social. In terms of proportion of the population, this means that 42% of the world’s population use social media. Although, this figure varies wildly around the world - from 70% in Eastern Asia and 61% in the USA, down to just 6% in parts of Africa.

2: Facebook signed up its one-billionth user in 2012, on September the 14th, to be precise; as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

This showed unprecedented growth for the platform. From its debut in 2004, it had taken eight years to pass this milestone, the first social media platform so to do. Now, another eight years on, Facebook’s growth continues to be steady, standing at 2.7 billion in Q2 of 2020.

3: Yusaku Maezawa posted a tweet which was retweeted a total of 4.4 billion times on (or shortly after) the 5th of January, 2020. Maezawa is a Japanese billionaire and entrepreneur who runs the online fashion retailer Zozotown. He offered one million yen (approximately £7,155) to 100 randomly-chosen followers. There are, we should point out, only 126 million people in Japan.

The message translates to: “ZOZOTOWN New Year's sale is the fastest ever and the transaction volume has exceeded 10 billion yen!!! With daily gratitude, I will give 1 million yen [a total of 100 million yen of New Year's gift] in cash from 100 individuals. To apply, just follow me and RT this tweet. Reception is until 1/7. I will DM directly to the winners!”

4: The first video posted on YouTube was called ‘Me at the Zoo’. It was posted April 23, 2005 and featured YouTube’s co-creator, Jawed Karim, then 26 years old, who stands in front of the elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo and informs us that the cool thing about elephants is that they have “really, really, really long trunks”. Although this insight isn’t likely to put Sir David Attenborough’s achievements in the shade, this video has been watched more than 108 million times and is still here, so you can enjoy it too.

5: Facebook Reactions were released on February 24th, 2016. They aren’t exactly like the unicode emojis which inspired them, but they’re close enough for people to understand their meaning. As Wired Magazine reports, a lot of research went in to discovering which emojis people used the most, until they had finally decided on the cast of six characters that they rolled out that February.

Then, in March 2020, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, Facebook added the ‘Care’ reaction, allowing people to express their feelings for each other and for frontline workers during the global lockdown.

6: Twitter now allows 280 characters or unicode glyphs and they began to roll this upgrade out in September 2017. As they explain in this blog, 9% of tweets were hitting the 140 character limit and, particularly in English, people were finding they had to employ abbreviations which they, otherwise, wouldn’t.

7: The most followed celebrities on the platform are footballer, Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano), with 236 million followers and singer, Ariana Grande (@arianagrande), with 197 million followers. However, The most followed account on Instagram is its own (@instagram), with nearly 354 million followers.

8: Anderson. Tom Anderson co-founded the social network site, MySpace in 2003 and is popularly known as ‘MySpace Tom’ or ‘Tom from MySpace’.

9: ITV bought Friends Reunited in 2005, for £175 million. It was the first British social media platform which, back when it was launched in 2000, offered a unique way for people to get back in touch with long-lost friends. When they bought it, ITV’s then-Chairman, Michael Grade, described the site as "the sweet spot" of the internet. However, with Facebook and Twitter already rapidly taking the social media world by storm, Friends Reunited quickly lost its gap in the market. In 2009, ITV sold Friends Reunited for just £25 million. The platform finally closed down in 2016.

10: TikTok was downloaded 738 million times in 2019. As Business of Apps reveals, TikTok has been downloaded a total of 1.5 billion times in all, making it the seventh-most downloaded app of the 2010s, which is impressive enough, until you realise that half of those downloads happened in 2019. TikTok is certainly the social media platform to watch.