Social Media Usage and Digital Engagement Across Major Economies: Insights from BRIC, EU, and the United States

This paper examines the BRIC, European Union and United States economies’ social media usage trends in both personal and business-oriented activities. We employed a cross-sectional survey design, which involved standardized questionnaires to obtain feedback from respondents who reported that interaction with the platforms and usage depended on the activity. Interregional differences were determined using binary and ordinal variables through the methods of regional means, standard errors, and chi-square tests and pair-wise comparisons. Findings have shown that although personal use is predominantly done through connecting with family and friends on a global scale, business usage is highly diversified, with the US being more multi-faceted in their strategic use. In addition, there was variance in preferences on the platforms with MySpace and Twitter being the most used in BRIC nations. Lastly, the EU tended to be more invested in several platforms for business reasons.