Last Updated: 04/11/2024
Most articles about software that have “statistics” or “trends” in the title are going to throw some very large numbers at you. “The digital signage market reached $21.59 billion in 2023!” Or “the compound annual growth rate in the digital signage market is 7.8%!” How do those numbers actually help an individual business owner? What impact do they have on a company’s decision to invest in new technology? Very little. At least, compared to statistics that showcase how real-world users take advantage of business software.
With more than 9,000 organizations around the world using ScreenCloud for digital signage, our usage statistics can give you a glimpse of what to expect. These statistics include everything from manufacturing facilities to yoga studios, employee engagement screens to B2C signage. The takeaways are industry-agnostic and relevant to companies of all sizes. Here’s what we found.
You might think that digital signage is a giant leap, with most companies jumping from zero screens straight to 20. That’s rarely the case. What we typically see is that companies start with between one and three screens. Just like a small business starts with the founders and a couple of early hires. They get a feel for what people like and don’t like. When they hit their stride, they expand quickly. For digital signage, that first leap is to between 10 and 20 screens.
If anything, 97% of digital signage users having fewer than 35 screens means that small businesses are actually underrepresented. US Census Data on company sizes shows that the smallest businesses account for 99% of all registered companies.
Some of our customers have fleets of over 50 screens managed by a single person, while other accounts have 20 screens and 75 active users (for the statistics nerds out there, the correlation coefficient is 0.512). ScreenCloud’s Channels, Playlists, and customer user permissions simplify content organization and delegation so you can build a system that works with your existing processes.
For example, a deskless organization might put a group of HR employees in charge of a ‘Manufacturing Floor’ channel and administrative employees on a ‘Back Office’ channel. Or maybe your company has multiple satellite offices, and you want one person working full-time to keep everything consistent and on-brand – it’s totally up to you.
You can create all of the automated, custom-coded content that you want, but you can’t ignore the basics. People need to know when they’re running late for lunch and whether they should head to the breakroom for free pizza or grab an umbrella before heading out the door.
Even massive multinational conglomerates like 3M don’t outgrow these apps. One of 3M’s Digital Marketing Leaders, Ranim Amin, says “We use a mix of the native apps and our own programs. We use the Weather, social media, and Clock apps…We have simple templates for internal messages and upload our own images and videos, which helps provide employee education about 3M to promote knowledge, new product launches, and achievements.”
“Glanceable” content is helpful, evergreen, and broadly appealing. When you’re first setting up your signage, start with these three apps and expand from there.
In ScreenCloud, you add an app to your account and then create individual ‘instances’ for each separate piece of content. So while YouTube comes in ninth based on the number of organizations that have added it to their account, it’s first by a country mile based on the number of instances across all organizations. When people play YouTube videos on their digital signage, they play a lot of different videos.
Microsoft’s business intelligence tool, Power BI, is a similar story. On average, organizations have more than six separate instances, or dashboards, running live in their digital signage rotation. When you need to showcase internal data, Power BI should be your go-to option.
Microsoft may be untouchable when it comes to business intelligence reporting, but when its popularity wanes when it comes to simpler, more straightforward apps like spreadsheets and calendars. Google Sheets and Calendar outshine Excel and Outlook in every metric.
The total number of ScreenCloud customers that use Google Sheets and Calendar is significantly higher than Microsoft’s, and the ratio of instances per organization is nearly double. What makes this even more notable is that by some (admittedly dated) estimates, there are 4x as many Excel users as Sheets users.
Ranked 11th overall, Instagram has more than double the number of installs and instances as Facebook. That’s in line with the Pew Research Center’s 2022 report, which found that Facebook use among young people fell by more than half while Instagram grew in popularity over the same period.
TikTok is more popular than Instagram outside of digital signage ecosystems, but it’s hard to tell how many people are running it on their screens. But with 93% of consumers agreeing that user-generated content is helpful when making a purchasing decision, it’s worth hacking together a solution. Users can connect social media aggregators like Walls.io and Taggbox Display to TikTok profiles or paste one of TikTok’s clunky embed codes into ScreenCloud Playgrounds.
Surely companies with over 25 screens are creating branded assets in an app like Photoshop and uploading them straight to their screens…right? Our customer data suggests otherwise. Customers with 25 or more connected screens averaged 96 saved Canvas designs.
The simplicity of the editor, combined with 100s of templates, brand enforcement features, and QR code generation tools means you don’t have to wait for your resident designer to create content that grabs people’s attention.
That’s a huge improvement for big organizations like BASF. One of their Comms Specialists, Maggie Krol, says “Previously…we used an old system that required a lot of heavy lifting from the corporate side; not all of our sites have graphic designers on hand, and some of our content managers are out and about in the field…[now] all of the resources we need to create good content are in one place. So if you're not a graphic designer, but need to get content up on your screens, you have features like Canvas to create beautiful content.”
Some people download and run ScreenCloud from their TV’s app store or from an iPad with our iOS app, but the overwhelming majority of users end up relying on external media players. Amazon’s Fire TV Sticks are the most popular choice for small-fleet organizations and those with signage that doesn’t require significant resources. For more demanding content, however, the Station P1 Pro is a popular choice with twice the RAM and 4x the onboard storage to ensure that signage runs smoothly and reliably.
So, start with two or three screens, possibly powered by a Fire Stick that you already have lying around. Add popular apps like Noticeboard and YouTube to your signage while asking employees and customers what they think. Then, when you’re ready, start adding new screens, apps, and data visualizations into the mix. It’s worked for thousands of other organizations, and we’re sure it’ll work for you too.
Or maybe you want to do things differently. You want to build your own integrations and apps with some basic HTML and JavaScript. That might be signage that you update with nothing more than a Siri command or user-generated content that’s moderated entirely by AI. Grab a free 14-day ScreenCloud trial and get started.
ScreenCloud works on any screen, TV or device, and there's no need to give us your credit card details.