Meta Platforms had 74,067 full-time employees as of December 2024, down from 67317 people in 2023. As of December 2023, more than 262,000 employees at tech companies worldwide were laid off throughout the year across more than one thousand companies. Facebook: how it all beganIn 2003, a sophomore at named Mark Zuckerberg hacked into protected areas of the university's computer network in order to find photos of other students. He then would pair two of them next to each other on a program called “Facemash” and ask users to choose the more attractive person. At the beginning of 2004, Zuckerberg launched “The Facebook,” a social network dedicated to Harvard students, which later grew to encompass Columbia, Yale and Stanford. The popularity of this new service sky-rocketed and in mid-2004, Zuckerberg interrupted his studies and moved his operation to Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. By 2006, Facebook was open to the general public. In 2020, the company reported almost 86 billion U.S. dollars in revenue and a net income of 29.15 billion US dollars. It is also the most popular social network in the world, with 2.7 billion monthly active users as of December 2020. Facebook employee diversity criticismLike many other tech companies, Facebook has been criticized for having a diversity problem. As of June 2020, tech positions, as well as management roles in U.S. offices were overwhelmingly occupied by men. Furthermore, almost 41 percent of Facebook employees in the U.S. are White and only 3.9 percent are African-American, which has sparked concern regarding representation and equal opportunities. Around 63.2 percent of senior level positions are occupied by White employees and only 4.3 percent by Hispanic-Americans.

In fiscal year 2024, the total number of employees at Meta Platforms was 74,067. The employee count increasedby 6,750 from 67,317 (in 2023) to 74,067 (in 2024). It represents a 10.03% year-over-year growth in employee count.

Meta reported 67.32K in Employees for its fiscal year ending in December of 2023. Data for Meta | FB - Employees Total Number including historical, tables and charts were last updated by Trading Economics this last March in 2025.

In March 2024, Threads generated around 28 million downloads worldwide. Meta Platforms released its X competitor Threads in July 2023. The app generated about 73 million app downloads within the first month of release. The text-based social platform was initially launched in 100 countries but was notable absent in the EU due to data protection regulations. On December 14, 2023, Threads was finally launched in the EU.

As of June 2022, 57.6 percent of employees in leadership roles at Meta were white, whilst 28.6 percent were Asian. Overall, 11.7 percent of employees in non-technical roles were Hispanic, and 11.2 percent were Black. Moreover, Asian employees accounted for the majority of employees in technical roles, making up 55.8 percent of employees in these positions.

As of June 2022, only 37.1 percent of all global Meta Platforms employees were women. The majority of employees were male. Overall, women made up 25.8 percent of tech roles and 60.5 percent of non-tech roles.

With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide. The platform surpassed two billion active users in the second quarter of 2017, taking just over 13 years to reach this milestone. In comparison, Meta-owned Instagram took 11.2 years, and Google’s YouTube took just over 14 years to achieve this landmark. As of January 2022, Facebook’s leading audience base was in India, with almost 330 million users whilst the United States ranked second with an approximate total of 179 million users. The platform also finds remarkable popularity in Indonesia and Brazil. Social Media usage in the United States In January 2021, Facebook was the platform on which users in the United States spent the most time per day. The average time spent on Facebook was 33 minutes, followed by TikTok with 32 minutes and Twitter with 31 daily minutes. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, all major social media platforms saw an increase in daily usage, which then either plateaued or decreased in 2021. At the end of 2021, over a quarter of all Facebook users in the United States belonged to the 25 to 34 year age group and 18.2 percent of users were in the 35 to 44 year age group. In general, Facebook users were more likely to be female. Meta Platforms Meta is Facebook’s recently renamed parent company and had a grand total of 3.59 billion core product users by the final quarter of 2021. Other Meta products include Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Oculus – Meta’s virtual reality subsidiary which produces VR headsets. In 2021, Meta's revenue amounted to 117 billion US dollars, up from around 86 billion U.S. dollars in the previous financial year.

Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook Inc., continues to dominate the digital landscape with impressive financial growth. In 2024, the company's annual revenue reached a staggering 164.5 billion U.S. dollars, marking a significant increase from 134.9 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year. This upward trajectory reflects Meta's ability to monetize its vast user base across multiple platforms, solidifying its position as a tech giant. Advertising remains the primary revenue driver The bulk of Meta's revenue stems from its advertising operations, particularly within its Family of Apps segment. In 2024, this segment, which includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, generated 162 billion U.S. dollars. Despite a slight dip in 2022, Meta's advertising revenue has shown remarkable resilience and growth potential. User engagement and global reach The company's global influence is further illustrated by the fact that every minute, 138.9 million Reels are played on Facebook and Instagram, showcasing the ongoing evolution of user engagement within the Meta ecosystem.

In 2024, Meta Platforms generated a revenue of over 164 billion U.S. dollars, up from 134 billion USD in 2023. The majority of Meta’s profits come from its advertising revenue.Meta’s total Family of Apps revenue for 2022 amounted to 114 billion U.S. dollars. Additionally, Meta’s Reality Labs, the company’s VR division, generated around 2.1 billion dollars. Meta’s marketing expenditure for 2022 amounted to just over 15 billion U.S. dollars, up from 14 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year. Increasing audience base despite privacy misgivings Meta’s user numbers have continued to grow steadily throughout past years. In the fourth quarter of 2022, there was a total of 3.74 billion worldwide users across all of Meta’s platforms. For this same time frame, the company recorded 407 million monthly active users across Europe. Downloads of Meta’s app Oculus, for which virtual reality headsets are required, increased greatly from 2020 to 2021, reaching a total of 10.62 million downloads by the end of last year. Up until 2021, downloads had grown in a steady manner but from 2020 to 2021, they more than doubled.User numbers have increased despite data security issues and past controversy such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. There remains skepticism surrounding the idea of the metaverse in which Meta aims to immerse itself. Of surveyed adults in the United States, the majority said that they were concerned about their privacy if Meta were to succeed in creating the metaverse.

As of January 2024, Meta's largest audience were women aged 25 to 34 years, who made up 12.4 percent of users. Men of the same age group followed, accounting for 11.9 percent of users. Overall, less than 15 percent of Meta's audience, which includes platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, were aged between 65 years and above.

During the fourth quarter of 2023, Meta stated that 3.98 billion people were using at least one of the company's core products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger) each month. This was a slight increase of monthly active users (MAU) when compared to the previous quarter. Daily active users (DAU) of Meta's core products also saw year-over-year increases.

As of January 2025, 24.2 percent of Facebook users in the United States were aged between 25 and 34 years, making up Facebook’s largest audience in the country. Overall, 19 percent of users belonged to the 18 to 24-year age group. Does everyone in the U.S. use Facebook? In 2023, there were approximately 247 million Facebook users in the U.S., a figure which is projected to steadily increase, and reach 262.8 million by 2028. Social media users in the United States have a very high awareness of the social media giant. Expectedly, 94 percent of users had heard of the brand in 2023. Although the vast majority of U.S. social networkers knew of Facebook, the likeability of the platform was not so impressive at 68 percent. Nonetheless, usage, loyalty, and buzz around the brand remained relatively high. Facebook, Meta, and the metaverse A strategic rebranding from Facebook to Meta Platforms in late 2021 boded well for the company in Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to be strongly linked to the metaverse, and to be considered more than just a social media company. According to a survey conducted in the U.S. in early 2022, Meta Platforms is the brand that Americans most associated with the metaverse.  

How many people use Instagram?

Instagram is a social media app which focuses on photo and video sharing. It is owned by Facebook, which recently rebranded as Meta, in a move towards the metaverse. As of December 2021, Instagram reached a new milestone of 2 billion active users worldwide. The platform previously reached 1 billion users in June 2018.

Users aged 25 to 34 years made up the biggest Instagram user group by age worldwide, followed by 18 to 24 year olds. Overall, men accounted for 51.6 percent of global Instagram users.

Most popular Instagram accounts and content

Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo was the most followed person on Instagram as of 2021, with approximately 315 million followers. Ranked in second and third position were the Rock and Ariana Grande, both having over 250 million followers each.

It’s not only athletes and actors who drive the views on Instagram though. Instagram has long since become a medium for people and communities to spread their messages, and in the past two years, social activists and educators have used Instagram for their movements. Political and educational accounts generate high engagement rates with their content. Posts from political accounts receive an average engagement rate of 2.74 percent and educational posts receive an average of 2.56 percent.

Social media usage worldwide

There are 3.4 billion social media users worldwide and this is expected to increase to 4.41 billion by 2025. Instagram is most popular in India with a total of 201.1 million users, followed by the U.S. with 157.1 million and Brazil with 114.9 million active users. Instagram is the fourth most popular social media site in the world, after Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp, respectively.

As of October 2021, Brunei was the country with the highest Instagram audience reach with 92 percent of the population using the platform. This was followed by Guam with 79.2 percent and the Cayman Islands with 78.8 percent audience reach.

As of October 2021, Facebook had almost 3 billion users worldwide. The penetration rate for Facebook in the United States in 2021 was 70.59 percent and it is expected to reach 76.87 percent by 2026.

During a 2024 survey among marketers worldwide, around 86 percent reported using Facebook for marketing purposes. Instagram and LinkedIn followed, respectively mentioned by 79 and 65 percent of the respondents. The global social media marketing segment According to the same study, 59 percent of responding marketers intended to increase their organic use of YouTube for marketing purposes throughout that year. LinkedIn and Instagram followed with similar shares, rounding up the top three social media platforms attracting a planned growth in organic use among global marketers in 2024. Their main driver is increasing brand exposure and traffic, which led the ranking of benefits of social media marketing worldwide. Social media for B2B marketing Social media platform adoption rates among business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketers vary according to each subsegment's focus. While B2C professionals prioritize Facebook and Instagram – both run by Meta, Inc. – due to their popularity among online audiences, B2B marketers concentrate their endeavors on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn due to its goal to connect people and companies in a corporate context.

Android maintained its position as the leading mobile operating system worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2024 with a market share of about 72.04 percent. Android's closest rival, Apple's iOS, had a market share of approximately 27.49 percent during the same period. The leading mobile operating systems Both unveiled in 2007, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS have evolved through incremental updates introducing new features and capabilities. The latest version of iOS, iOS 18, was released in September 2024, while the most recent Android iteration, Android 15, was made available in September 2023. A key difference between the two systems concerns hardware - iOS is only available on Apple devices, whereas Android ships with devices from a range of manufacturers such as Samsung, Google and OnePlus. In addition, Apple has had far greater success in bringing its users up to date. As of February 2024, 66 percent of iOS users had iOS 17 installed, while in the same month only 13 percent of Android users ran the latest version. The rise of the smartphone From around 2010, the touchscreen smartphone revolution had a major impact on sales of basic feature phones, as the sales of smartphones increased from 139 million units in 2008 to 1.39 billion units in 2023. In 2020, smartphone sales decreased to 1.38 billion units due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Apple, Samsung, and lately also Xiaomi, were the big winners in this shift towards smartphones, with BlackBerry and Nokia among those unable to capitalize.

The total number of active social media users has noticeably increased in Russia, except for 2017, when the audience dropped in volume across the country. By January 2023, there were 106 million active users of social media platforms in Russia.  

Popular social media platforms in Russia

VK (Vkontakte) was the leading social media platform in the country with a penetration rate of over 75 percent as of the third quarter of 2022. The platform in question gained momentum after Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram were banned in Russia on the grounds of extremism in March 2022. By November 2022, VK counted nearly 85 monthly users.

Social media usage in Russia

The increasingly interconnected world means that more and more Russians use social media these days. In August 2021, the most frequently employed devices for connecting to social networks were mobile appliances. This was particularly the case of Instagram and Telegram, where 93 percent and 99 percent used only mobile phones to access the social networks in question, respectively. Among the most frequent activities on social media were sending private messages, with every six in 10 Russians reporting doing it in 2022.

In the fourth quarter of 2024 social company Meta's total revenue amounted to 46.8 billion U.S. dollars, the majority of which was generated through advertising. Facebook company information It is hard to imagine internet without social media and social media without Facebook. With 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide. In fact, almost two billion users access Facebook on a daily basis. Due to its immense reach, Facebook is a highly influential publisher and one of the leading platforms for influencer marketing worldwide, surpassed only by Instagram and YouTube. Brands value social media marketing for increased exposure, traffic, and leads, and it is no surprise that Facebook can deliver on these metrics in vast quantities.

In September 2024, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined Meta Ireland 91 million euros after passwords of social media users were stored in 'plaintext' on Meta's internal systems rather than with cryptographic protection or encryption. In May 2023, the EU fined Meta 1.2 billion euros for violating laws on digital privacy and putting the data of EU citizens at risk through Facebook's EU-U.S. data transfers. European privacy legislation is seen as being far stricter than American privacy law, and the sending of EU citizens’ data to the United States resulted in the record breaking penalty being issued to the tech giant. In January 2023, after it was discovered that Meta Platforms had improperly required that users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accept personalized adverts to use the platforms, the company was issued a 390 million euro fine by the European Commission. EU regulators claim that the social media giant broke the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by including the demand in its terms of service. In addition, Meta was fined 405 million euros by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) in September 2022 for violating Instagram's children's privacy settings. In November 2022, the DPC fined Meta a further 265 million euros for failing to protect their users from data scraping. GDPR violations in 2022 Social media sites and companies are not the only types of online services upon which users' data can potentially be compromised. In 2022, the online service with the biggest fine for violating GDPR was e-commerce and digital powerhouse Amazon, which was issued a 746 million euro fine. Furthermore, in December 2021, Google was penalized 90 million euros for GDPR violations. What are the most common GDPR violations? Since GDPR went into effect in May 2018, fines have been imposed for a variety of reasons. As of June 2022, companies' non-compliance with general data processing principles accounted for the largest share of fines, resulting in over 845 million euros worth of penalties. Insufficient legal basis for data processing was the second most common violation, amounting to 447 million euros in fines.

In 2021, there were 1.21 billion monthly active users of Meta's Instagram, making up over 28 percent of the world's internet users. By 2025, it has been forecast that there will be 1.44 billion monthly active users of the social media platform, which would account for 31.2 percent of global internet users.

How popular is Instagram?

Instagram, as of January 2022, was the fourth most popular social media platform in the world in terms of user numbers. YouTube and WhatsApp ranked in second and third place, respectively, whilst Facebook remained the most popular, with almost three billion monthly active users worldwide.

India had the largest number of Instagram users as of January 2022, with a total of over 230 million users in the country. The second-largest Instagram audience could be found in the United States, with almost 160 million people subscribing to the photo and video sharing app.

Gen Z and Instagram

As of September 2021, Gen Z users in the United States spent an average of five hours per week on Instagram. Although Instagram ranked third in terms of hours per week spent on the platform, Gen Z users spent considerably more time on TikTok, amounting to a weekly average of over 10 hours being spent on the mobile-first video app.

Most followed accounts on Instagram

As of May 2022, Instagram’s own account had 504.37 million followers. In terms of celebrities, Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (@chistiano) had over 440.41 million followers on the social network. Moreover, the average media value of an Instagram post by Ronaldo was over 985,000 U.S. dollars.

The most liked post on Instagram as of May 2022 was Photo of an Egg, which was posted in 2019 by the account @world_record_egg. Photo of an Egg has not only exceeded 55 million likes on the platform, but it also has nearly 3.5 million comments, and the account itself has over 4.5 million Instagram followers. After mysterious posts published by the account, World Record Egg revealed itself as part of a mental health campaign aimed at the difficulties and demands of using social media.

A global survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2023 found that the main reason for using social media was to keep in touch with friends and family, with over 49 percent of social media users saying this was their main reason for using online networks. Overall, 38 percent of social media users said that filling spare time was their main reason for using social media platforms, whilst 34.3 percent of respondents said they used it to read news stories. One in five users were on social platforms for the reason of following celebrities and influencers. The most popular social network Facebook dominates the social media landscape. The world's most popular social media platform turned 20 in February 2024, and it continues to lead the way in terms of user numbers. As of January 2024, the social network had over three billion global users. YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram follow, but none of these well-known brands can surpass Facebook’s audience size. Moreover, as of the final quarter of 2023, there were almost four billion Meta product users. Ever-evolving social media usage The utilization of social media remains largely gratuitous; however, companies have been encouraging users to become paid subscribers to reduce dependence on advertising profits. Meta Verified entices users by offering a blue verification badge and proactive account protection, among other things. X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, and Reddit also offer users the chance to upgrade their social media accounts for a monthly free.