Datareportal - understand Newcomer technology and social media use in their countries of origin

If you're curious about Immigrant and Refugee social media habits before they arrived in Canada, be sure to have a look at the DataReportal country reports.

The DataReportal site provides free reports that give you useful statistics and trends in the use of mobile phones, internet adoption, and social media use, including year-on-year growth trends. These reports provide one part of how you can explore ways of finding and effectively outreaching to Newcomers by understanding the technologies, internet access, mobile phone use, and information and trust trends in their countries of origin.

I say one part because of course you should be also referring to Canadian and international research on Newcomer Information Practice, as well as asking Newcomers directly about their tech and information practices and preferences. Preferences are important because just because a Newcomer might use FB Messenger doesn't necessarily mean they want to use it to communicate with you. Knowing that is essential to how you craft and build your hybrid services and communication channels to reach, inform, educate, and serve Newcomers.

For example, years before we seem to have started figuring out that Newcomers are phone/mobile-first in tech device use, you would have seen this trend from immigration source countries. This data can and should be part of our technology planning and policy research.

Watch this video to get a global snapshot of trends from July 2022:

You can also read the full report of these trends, and flip through the presentation slides:

You can browse or search for reports by country, by year, specific social media and platform reports, regional reports, and special reports such as quarterly updates to stats and information.

For example, you might be curious about

• the main reasons why people use connected devices and services in 2022
• the latest trends in time spent with media, including insights into how much time people spend online, watching TV, using social media, and engaging with their phone
• language and culture across the internet, and explore how our global connected habits are reshaping the world’s content preferences
• the social media behaviours of South-East Asia’s young adults