Growth of Social Media and the Flexible Workspace

By Zuzana Padychova

The modern office is nothing like it used to be 10 years ago. Due to advances in technology, work has become more flexible and fluid, and the ways employees and supervisors communicate is a lot more mobile thanks to social media and various communication oriented apps.

The last few years, we’ve seen how many more workers aren’t required to come in to the office anymore, and how those that do make use of flexible workspaces are a far cry from the mundane cubicles of yesteryear.

They’re open plan, malleable, vibrant, and, in most cases, they’re shared by remote workers from various companies. With all the technology innovations readily available and accessible to most, there’s no need to have one fixed workplace anymore. Technology has given us the opportunity to accomplish some kinds of work from anywhere in the world as long as we have access to an internet connection.

One area that has played an important role in the evolution of the workplace is social media. Whether it’s the use of internal or external social networks for communication between workers and bosses or using it as an on-the-go marketing tool to keep clients and customers informed, it’s popularity for work is increasing just like it is for personal use.

To help put this into perspective, a new animated infographic from Coupofy displays the growth of the top 9 social media platforms seemingly in real time. Coupofy took the last known yearly and other data points and averaged them down to the second. It really puts into perspective just how huge the medium has become when you see the clock ticking and the growth metrics rising.

Here’s a small sneak peak of what you’ll see in it:

In just 3 minutes the “professional networking” site LinkedIn saw an estimated 52,020 profile views and 14,940 endorsements. 360 new people had also signed up to the service.

Twitter, which is a great tool for customer relations and marketing, was estimated to get 1 million tweets and 4 million searches in the same time period.

The infographic also allows you to  look into the future and see projections for an hour, day,  month, and year.

In just one day LinkedIn is estimated to get 43,978 mobile job applications, 172,800 new users, 7 million endorsements, and a whopping 25 million profile views!

Twitter jumped to 500 million tweets, a staggering 2 billion searches and also saw 44,410 new users; 35,597 of which were mobile users.

You can see similar growth metrics for Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest, Google Plus, and Tumblr.

Each of these has different applications in the flexible workspace industry, but as a whole, their key benefit is communication and networking. Companies are able to message their workforce, regardless of  whether they’re in “the” office or somewhere else entirely. Staff can communicate together on projects, and they can also network with those outside of the company.

Meanwhile, Human Resources are using social media to correspond with job applicants and see whether they’d be a good fit for the company or not. Sales and Marketing departments are using it to generate leads and monitor customers and clients, while Research & Development can tap into the data to brainstorm new ideas.

The platform can also be used to leverage the collective skills and intelligence of everybody in the company, to help come up with solutions or ideas, rather than relying on a specific department. Perhaps one day an employee’s response to the corporate Tweet could land them a promotion?

What the future holds for social media and the workplace isn’t clear, but one thing’s for sure – its usage is only going to keep increasing.

So, without further ado, check out the Social Media In Real Time counter!