Young people in Australia are more likely to have more friends on Facebook, with the average user between the ages of 18 to 29 years having almost *** friends on the platform. This is in contrast with senior citizens (65 years and above) who seem to be more selective, having an average of just under ** friends on Facebook.

The most used social media platform  

Australia has very high social media penetration rate, with a majority of the population having an account on a social media platform. It is partially due to the country’s high internet penetration rate and cultural influences from the western world on social media trends. Furthermore, the number of Facebook users in Australia has been increasing steadily, with a forecast of approximately **** million Australians having an account on the social media platform by the year 2022. This figure would represent more than ** percent of the nation’s population, making it the most used social media platform in Australia. 

Demographics of Facebook users  

The use of Facebook in Australia is dominated by 25- to 34-year-old millennials, with around *** million Australians in this age bracket using the social networking site in 2018. Younger generations in Australia are also more active Facebook users with those between 18 to 29 years using the platform four times more per week than those over the age of 65 years. Elderly users of social media however were most likely to have a Facebook account in comparison to other generations.   

As of June 2025, users aged 25 to 34 years made up Facebook's largest audience in the United States, accounting for **** percent of the social network's user base, with **** percent of those users being women. Overall, *** percent of users aged 35 to 44 years were women, and *** percent were men. How many people use Facebook in the United States? ******** is by far the most used social network in the world and finds a huge share of its audience in ****************** Facebook’s U.S. audience size comes second only to India. In 2023, there were over *** million Facebook users in the U.S. By 2028, it is estimated that around *** million people in the U.S. will be signed up for the platform. How do users in the United States view the platform? Although Facebook is widely used and very popular with U.S. consumers, there are issues of trust with its North American audience. As of November 2021, ** percent of respondents reported that they did not trust Facebook with their personal data. Despite having privacy doubts, a May 2022 survey found that ** percent of adults had a very favorable opinion of Facebook, and one-third held a somewhat positive view of the platform.

The chart shows that Americans over 65 were more likely to share fake news to their Facebook friends, regardless of their education, ideology, and partisanship. The oldest age group was likely to share nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains on Facebook as those in the youngest age group, or about 2.3 times as many as those in the next-oldest age group. The data regarding the age group 18-29 and 30-44 are not displayed in the source, therefore the value of data in this chart are approximate, determined with pixel count.

How much time do people spend on social media? As of 2025, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 141 minutes per day, down from 143 minutes in the previous year. Currently, the country with the most time spent on social media per day is Brazil, with online users spending an average of 3 hours and 49 minutes on social media each day. In comparison, the daily time spent with social media in the U.S. was just 2 hours and 16 minutes. Global social media usageCurrently, the global social network penetration rate is 62.3 percent. Northern Europe had an 81.7 percent social media penetration rate, topping the ranking of global social media usage by region. Eastern and Middle Africa closed the ranking with 10.1 and 9.6 percent usage reach, respectively. People access social media for a variety of reasons. Users like to find funny or entertaining content and enjoy sharing photos and videos with friends, but mainly use social media to stay in touch with current events friends. Global impact of social mediaSocial media has a wide-reaching and significant impact on not only online activities but also offline behavior and life in general. During a global online user survey in February 2019, a significant share of respondents stated that social media had increased their access to information, ease of communication, and freedom of expression. On the flip side, respondents also felt that social media had worsened their personal privacy, increased a polarization in politics and heightened everyday distractions.

Types of information, percentages and average number on friends' Facebook profiles.

Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently sits at more than three billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns four of the biggest social media platforms, all with more than one billion monthly active users each: Facebook (core platform), WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. In the third quarter of 2023, Facebook reported around four billion monthly core Family product users. The United States and China account for the most high-profile social platforms Most top ranked social networks with more than 100 million users originated in the United States, but services like Chinese social networks WeChat, QQ or video sharing app Douyin have also garnered mainstream appeal in their respective regions due to local context and content. Douyin’s popularity has led to the platform releasing an international version of its network: a little app called TikTok. How many people use social media? The leading social networks are usually available in multiple languages and enable users to connect with friends or people across geographical, political, or economic borders. In 2025, social networking sites are estimated to reach 5.42 billion users and these figures are still expected to grow as mobile device usage and mobile social networks increasingly gain traction in previously underserved markets.

Purpose For the purpose of informing tobacco intervention programs, this dataset was created and used to explore how online social networks of smokers differed from those of nonsmokers. The study was a secondary analysis of data collected as part of a randomized control trial conducted within Facebook. (See "Other References" in "Metadata" for parent study information.) Basic description of 4 anonymized data files of study participants. fbr_friends: Anonymized Facebook friends networks, basic ego demographics, basic ego social media activity fbr_family: Anonymized Facebook family networks, basic ego demographics, basic ego social media activity fbr_photos: Anonymized Facebook photo networks, basic ego demographics, basic ego social media activity fbr_groups: Anonymized Facebook group networks, basic ego demographics, basic ego social media activity Each network comprises the ego, the ego's first degree connections, and the (second degree) connections between the ego's friends. Missing data and users who did not have friend, family, photo, or group networks were cleaned from the data beforehand. Each data file contains the following columns of data, taken with participant knowledge and consent participant_id: Nonidentifying ids assigned to different study participants. is_smoker: Binary value (0,1) that takes on the value 1 if participant was a smoker and 0 otherwise. gender: One of three categories: male, female, or blank, which signified Other (different from missing data). country: One of four categories: Canada (ca), US (us), Mexico (mx), or Other (xx). likes_count: Numeric data indicating number of Facebook likes the participant had made up to the date the data was collected. wall_count: Numeric data indicating number of Facebook wall posts the participant had made up to the date the data was collected. t_count_page_views: Numeric data indicating number of pages participant had visited in the UbiQUITous app up to the date the data was collected. yearsOld: Numeric data indicating age in years of the participant; right censored at 90 years for data anonymity. vertices: Number of people in the participant's network. edges: Number of connections between people in the network. density: The portion of potential connections in a network that are actual connections; a network-level metric; calculated after removing ego and isolates. mean_betweenness_centrality: An average of the relative importance of all individuals within their own network; a network-level metric; calculated after removing ego and isolates. transitivity: The extent to which the relationship between two nodes in a network that are connected by an edge is transitive (calculated as the number of triads divided by all possible connections); a network-level metric; calculated after removing ego and isolates. mean_closeness: Average of how closely associated members are to one another; a network-level metric; calculated after removing ego and isolates. isolates2: Number of individuals with no connections other than to the ego; a network-level metric. diameter3: Maximum degree of separation between any two individuals in the network; a network-level metric; calculated after removing ego and isolates. clusters3: Number of subnetworks; a network-level metric; calculated after removing ego and isolates. communities3: Number of groups, sorted to increase dense connections within the group and decrease sparse connections outside it (i.e., to maximize modularity); a network-level metric; calculated after removing ego and isolates. modularity3: The strength of division of a network into communities (calculated as the fraction of ties between community members in excess of the expected number of ties within communities if ties were random); a network-level metric. Detailed information on network metrics in the associated manuscript: "An exploration of the Facebook social networks of smokers and non-smokers" by Fu, L, Jacobs MA, Brookover J, Valente TW, Cobb NK, and Graham AL.

This statistic presents the leading reasons for Facebook users in the United States to access the social network. During the April 2018 survey period, 51 percent of respondents stated that one of their reasons for using Facebook was to keep in contact with friends. Additionally, 45 percent of respondents reported to using Facebook as a way to keep in contact with family.

This statistic presents the share of reasons that Facebook users in the United States are sharing less content with friends and followers on social media as of April 2018. According to the findings, 47 percent of surveyed Facebook users reported that the main reason as to why they were sharing less content with friends and followers on the social media platform was due to their privacy concerns revolving around Facebook itself.

With approximately 1.6 billion video views in March 2019, LADbible was ranked first among the most watched Facebook video publishers. Second-ranked UNILAD generated 1.6 billion video views. Both social news and entertainment publishers are owned by the British media company The LADbible Group Ltd.

Social video consumption Watching a video on the likes of Facebook or Instagram is now part of everyday social media usage. Whilst YouTube is as popular as ever, it is no longer the only source out there for online video viewers. With companies and influencers utilizing video for marketing purposes on Instagram, concertgoers broadcasting the event to their friends via Facebook Live and Twitter users endlessly retweeting their favorite vlogs, video content on social is here to stay. Social media is an important channel for video producers and many traditional media brands have started to generate content specifically to be distributed and discussed on social platforms. News, ads, viral moments, celebrity vlogs, sporting clips – the variety of video clips on social media is seemingly endless and users are highly engaged with video content on Facebook. As of February 2018, Facebook ranked first among social video platforms, accounting for a significant share of social media video posts across all tiers of influencers. The network accounted for 50 percent of social video posts by celebrity influencers with more than 20 million followers.

Mobile social video
A significant chunk of social video is consumed via mobile. One of the most popular mobile video apps is TikTok, which has over 3.7 million monthly active users in the United States. TikTok is a mobile app for creating and sharing short videos, which also can be edited in-app. The app merged with Musical.ly in August 2018, thus gaining access to the teenage online user market in the United States. Popular types of TikTok videos include dances, comedy sketches or lip-synchs to songs. The platform is frequently considered the spiritual successor to the now-defunct mobile video app Vine, and popular TikTok videos are frequently shared across other social networks.

Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most popular Instagram accounts as of April 2024.

              The Portuguese footballer is the most-followed person on the photo sharing app platform with 628 million followers. Instagram's own account was ranked first with roughly 672 million followers.

              How popular is Instagram?

              Instagram is a photo-sharing social networking service that enables users to take pictures and edit them with filters. The platform allows users to post and share their images online and directly with their friends and followers on the social network. The cross-platform app reached one billion monthly active users in mid-2018. In 2020, there were over 114 million Instagram users in the United States and experts project this figure to surpass 127 million users in 2023.

              Who uses Instagram?

              Instagram audiences are predominantly young – recent data states that almost 60 percent of U.S. Instagram users are aged 34 years or younger. Fall 2020 data reveals that Instagram is also one of the most popular social media for teens and one of the social networks with the biggest reach among teens in the United States.

              Celebrity influencers on Instagram
              Many celebrities and athletes are brand spokespeople and generate additional income with social media advertising and sponsored content. Unsurprisingly, Ronaldo ranked first again, as the average media value of one of his Instagram posts was 985,441 U.S. dollars.

More than three-quarters of the Russian online population aged 16 years and older used the Telegram messenger, thus making it the most-used social media platform among those listed in the ranking. WhatsApp ranked second, with a penetration rate of nearly 74 percent, followed by VK and TikTok. Social media usage in Russia In 2024, the daily time spent on social media in Russia was recorded at roughly two hours and 20 minutes per user on average. After Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) were blocked in Russia at the end of February and the beginning of March 2022, a significant increase in activity was recorded on VK and Telegram. For example, the daily audience on VK increased by almost nine percent, while the number of friends requests and feed views grew by 250 percent and 25 percent, respectively. YouTube From the global perspective, YouTube ranked second after Facebook, which remained the leading social media platform with about three billion active users. The U.S.-based channel MrBeast had the highest number of subscribers on YouTube with around 343 million as of January 2025. India-based T-Series followed with 284 million subscribers as of that month.

The social media industry in Hong Kong has gone from strength to strength. Facebook and WhatsApp remained the top with a 70.6 percent monthly usage rate as of the third quarter of 2024. Facebook lost its dominance in the market with a 77 percent penetration rate, followed by Instagram. The high internet quality It comes as no surprise that a large percentage of the population in the Asian financial hub are active social media users. Hong Kong citizens are known for being well connected in the social media world. It consistently ranks as having one of the fastest internet connections worldwide - as of April 2023, Hong Kong had an average fixed broadband internet connection speed of 205.19 Mbps. Facebook in Hong Kong Facebook is not just used for staying connected with friends and family; many in the financial hub also use it to keep up with the latest news and to research or find products to purchase. With such a high user penetration rate, Facebook has been particularly focused on brand advertising and user engagement. Mobile advertising accounted for a large chunk of Facebook’s global advertising revenue. In Hong Kong, social media advertising grew by 12 percent, while Facebook's ad revenue increased by four percent in the third quarter of 2022.

As of the latest reported period, WhatsApp had more than half a billion daily active Status users worldwide, up from 450 million global DAU in the second quarter of 2018. WhatsApp Status is similar to the Stories feature of other social apps such as Snapchat and Instagram, allowing users to share photos, videos and text that disappear after 24 hours. WhatsApp usage in the United States With over 1.5 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is the most popular mobile messenger app worldwide. As of 2019, the chat app had an estimated 68 million users in the United States, with forecasts projecting an audience size of almost 86 million users in 2023. Despite a sizable app audience, WhatsApp still lags behind competitors Facebook Messenger and Snapchat in terms of U.S. mobile reach and brand awareness. However, according to recent industry data, user engagement with WhatsApp grew 44 percent year-over-year, putting it ahead of other social networks including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. WhatsApp and Facebook In February 2014, WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for a then unheard-of figure for such a purchase – 19 billion U.S. dollars. The mobile messenger is one of Facebook’s four billion-user properties, along with the core Facebook platform, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. During the first quarter of 2019, Facebook stated that 2.7 billion people were using at least one of the company's core products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger) each month.

How many paid subscribers does Spotify have? As of the first quarter of 2025, Spotify had 268 million premium subscribers worldwide, up from 239 million in the corresponding quarter of 2024. Spotify’s subscriber base has increased dramatically in the last few years and has more than doubled since early 2019. Spotify and competitors Spotify is a music streaming service originally founded in 2006 in Sweden. The platform can be used from various devices and allows users to browse through a catalogue of music licensed through multiple record labels, as well as creating and sharing playlists with other users. Additionally, listeners are able to enjoy music for free with advertisements or are also given the option to purchase a subscription to allow for unlimited ad-free music streaming. Spotify’s largest competitors are Pandora, a company that offers a similar service and remains popular in the United States, and Apple Music, which was launched in 2015. While Pandora was once among the highest-grossing music apps in the Apple App Store, recent rankings show that global services like QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, and YouTube Music now generate higher monthly revenues.Users are also able to register Spotify accounts using Facebook directly through the website using an app. This enables them to connect with other Facebook friends and explore their music tastes and playlists. Spotify is a popular source for keeping up-to-date with music, and the ability to enjoy Spotify anywhere at any time allows consumers to shape their music consumption around their lifestyles and preferences.

According to a survey conducted among internet users in Vietnam by Decision Lab, as of the third quarter of 2024, around ** percent of respondents stated that they used Facebook, followed by Zalo, and YouTube. While Facebook and YouTube are known globally, Zalo is Vietnam’s premier chatting platform, which was first introduced to the population in 2012. Social media usage in Vietnam The number of social network users in Vietnam is forecasted to reach nearly ** million by 2028. While Facebook remains the most popular app to get news, Zalo was primarily used to connect with friends and family, according to a survey conducted among Vietnamese internet users in the third quarter of 2024. In addition to providing entertaining videos, YouTube also offers subscription services for celebrity channels. TikTok, the new rising app first launched in 2016, has become the leading social media app to watch short videos in Vietnam, especially among the Vietnamese Gen Z. Zalo in Vietnam Zalo was created by Vuong Quang Khai, the current executive vice president of the Vietnamese technology company VNG Corporation, and has reached over 100 million users worldwide. Zalo provides free instant messaging, voice messaging, and individual or in-group calls, allowing users to send high-quality media files as well as calendar functions in private groups. It also has a diary function for users to post emotions and upload photos. On average, people send over *********** messages, deliver around ** million pictures, and make ** million minutes of calls through Zalo every day globally.

This statistic presents the frequency of social media platform feature usage in the United States as of February 2018. According to the results, 47 percent of surveyed internet users in the United States stated that they preferred to use Facebook for news feed feature, while in comparison only six percent stated similar preferences in use for Instagram.

As of the third quarter of 2024, internet users in the Philippines spent an average of **** hours accessing the internet on various devices, according to a global survey. In terms of devices, most Filipinos have used their mobile phones to surf the web. Internet usage of Filipinos Being the population with the most time spent using the internet in the region, Filipino internet users have been taking advantage of the ease of communication and access to information and entertainment that the internet offers. Aside from just browsing the web, accessing social media has been popular among a large share of the Filipino population. As of the third quarter of 2023, Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, along with TikTok, were the most used social media platforms in the country. These platforms were used to connect with friends and family, and to access news and information, stream video content, and find products and services to purchase. Level of internet security in the Philippines Since most activities have been digitalized, cybersecurity threats and online fraud have been a growing concern among internet users. In the Philippines, over ** million web threats have been detected in 2022. Among those who shop on social media, product fraud was identified as the most common fraud type, along with non-delivery of products or services and payment fraud. To address this, the national government amended its cybersecurity laws to ensure better security of internet users in the Philippines.

In 2021, around ** percent of the internet users in Thailand went online for communication purposes. Other online activities such as health tracking, and food delivery became more popular recently very likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thailand’s internet user demographics and behaviors

It is no surprise that people across all ages rely on the internet. Each group of generations has different purposes when using the internet. Generation Y internet users in Thailand enjoy using the internet for social media and entertainment. While older demographics, such as baby boomer internet users search for data or read books on the internet and enjoy using the internet for social media. Internet is becoming more accessible to Thai users and has the potential to shape and change future online activities within each demographic.

Social media in Thailand Social media and online communication is the main activity which users across all demographics spend the most time on. The main platform among Thais is Facebook. Despite already being the most popular platform, the number of Facebook users is still expected to increase in the coming years. Additionally, the average share of Instagram users in Thailand is also higher than the global average. Apart from using social media to connect to friends and family, it is also a source of entertainment for online videos and streaming music.

As of April 2025, India had the biggest Snapchat user base in the world, with an audience of 210 million users. The United States ranked in second place with a Snapchat audience base of over 105 million users. Snapchat’s popularity Being one of the most popular social networks worldwide and especially liked by younger online audiences, Snapchat is an increasingly attractive platform for advertisers. According to industry estimates, Snapchat’s 2019 advertising revenue is forecast to amount to over 2.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, up from 1.53 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. Snapchat is a mobile-first social network, with the majority of visits generated via mobile phones. According to U.S. Snapchat users, the main reason for using the platform was to keep in contact with friends and family. Snapchat’s vanishing photo sharing function has popularized the sharing of everyday photos in a story stream, a setup that has since also been adopted by other photo and messaging apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Despite the competition, Snapchat users are among the most engaged – a total of 48 percent of U.S. Snapchat users post content to the app on a weekly basis. Only WhatsApp and Facebook can boast a more active audience.