The internet continues to grow and the world is becoming more interconnected throughout developing and developed markets. This has been clear to both individuals and businesses for some time in terms of how we are likely to individually and collectively increase web usage in the years to come. Cisco’s fifth annual assessment and accompanying prediction of global broadband growth on both wireless, managed, and fixed networks was released yesterday. In a sentence, the internet is going to be bigger and faster in the years to come – surprised?

Although this is surely expected, the rate of increase may not be. Let’s take a look at the projections, last year there were 31 exabytes of data used per month from 10.3 billion connections around the world, then looking to 2016, Cisco predicts that there will be 110 exabytes used per month from 18.9 billion connections. This is a sharp increase which has a range of impacts including network improvements, data plan cap increases, and most important to the marketer, more users and devices to engage with.

The numbers specifically tell us that current users are going to use the web more, more devices will be put into action, and many new users will come online.  Looking specifically at individual data usage, average personal use is 11.5 gigabytes per month, and Cisco predicts that will grow to an average of 32.3 gigabytes per month presumably by 2016.

In terms of devices, the greatest expected jump is with business connections from the current number of 2.2 billion connected devices to 5.1 billion in 2016 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18%. Next, is residential with 2011 number s at 2.4 billion connected devices jumping to 5.4 billion by 2016 with a CAGR of 17.3%.

With such rapid growth, there is great potential for further opportunity in social media marketing, search engine optimization, and paid search as more new users in all corners of the globe come online with many more devices. With that said more opportunity to promote businesses and market their missions will exist as expertise to address this need will be great. An element of this growth will be the convergence of various marketing solutions and campaigns across platforms and devices given the drastic increase in the amount of different ways people will be accessing online content. Marketers will need to respond to this by connecting the activity between the different platforms maximizing existing strategies and utilizing new social platforms and technologies that are yet to be created.

Check back often as I will come back to this topic again and specifically look at ways to coordinate such SEO and marketing activity in light of the web’s rapid expansion. Reach out to me directly at rbuddenhagen(at)webimax.com and @ryanwbudd for further comment or questions.