During the fourth quarter of 2023, the number of daily active users on Facebook reached 2.1 billion, a minor increase on the previous quarter. When compared with the number of daily active users in the final quarter of 2022, the platform has gained around 100 million users. Facebook’s penetration rate for the United States in 2023 was 72.13 percent, up from 71.43 percent in 2022. The social network’s audience reach is projected to stand at 75.79 percent by 2027.

Most popular social media websites

As of May 2021, Facebook was the most used social media site in the United States, accounting for 71.8 percent of all social media visits. Ranking in second place was Pinterest with 12.4 percent, followed by Twitter and Instagram, with 9.15 percent and 3.82 percent, respectively. Although other sites remain popular, Facebook’s number of visits made it undoubtably the leading social media platform in terms of social media site visits.

For Generation Z and Millennials in the United States, Facebook was one of the least popular platforms used to connect with others. Gen Z and Millennials preferred video sharing platforms, specifically Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Meta’s revenue

Facebook Inc was renamed as Meta in 2021, in a strategic step toward the metaverse. Meta Platforms is now the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp amongst others, together being known as Meta’s Family of Apps.

Meta’s annual revenue for 2021 was 117.92 billion U.S. dollars, up from 85.97 billion in 2020. Within a decade, the company has increased its annual revenue by approximately 114 billion U.S. dollars. In the most recent fiscal year, Meta’s Family of Apps were responsible for over 115 billion U.S. dollars’ worth of Meta’s revenue.

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.

Which county has the most Facebook users? There are more than 383 million Facebook users in India alone, making it the leading country in terms of Facebook audience size. To put this into context, if India’s Facebook audience were a country, then it would be ranked third in terms of largest population worldwide. Apart from India, there are several other markets with more than 100 million Facebook users each: The United States, Indonesia, and Brazil with 196.9 million, 122.3 million, and 111.65 million Facebook users respectively. Facebook – the most used social media Meta, the company that was previously called Facebook, owns four of the most popular social media platforms worldwide, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram. As of the third quarter of 2021, there were around 3.5 billion cumulative monthly users of the company’s products worldwide. With around 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social media worldwide. With an audience of this scale, it is no surprise that the vast majority of Facebook’s revenue is generated through advertising. Facebook usage by device As of July 2021, it was found that 98.5 percent of active users accessed their Facebook account from mobile devices. In fact, almost 81.8 percent of Facebook audiences worldwide access the platform only via mobile phone. Facebook is not only available through mobile browser as the company has published several mobile apps for users to access their products and services. As of the third quarter 2021, the four core Meta products were leading the ranking of most downloaded mobile apps worldwide, with WhatsApp amassing approximately six billion downloads.

Facebook is fast approaching 3 billion monthly active users. That’s about 36% of the world’s entire population that log in and use Facebook at least once a month.

The number of Facebook users in the United States was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 12.6 million users (+5.04 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Facebook user base is estimated to reach 262.8 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Facebook users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here regarding the platform facebook, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

Facebook probably needs no introduction; nonetheless, here is a quick history of the company. The world’s biggest and most-famous social network was launched by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a...

The average Facebook user spends about 19.6 per month on Facebook every month. This works out to be about 39 minutes per day.

56.5% of Facebook users worldwide are male. This is in direct contrast to only 43.5% of Facebook being female.

As of the fourth quarter of 2023, Facebook had a combined 272 million monthly active users (MAU) in the United States and Canada, up by one million users when compared to the previous quarter.

Facebook user data – additional information

Facebook’s data use policy or privacy policy as it is also known, highlights the company’s guidelines concerning user privacy, information and how they are likely to be used. It also highlights the difference between public and private data and the websites and third part apps which are integrated into its services.

Federal agencies and governments have the right to request user data from Facebook. This issue was highlighted in late 2014, when Facebook came under attack from the British press for not releasing relevant information on the men responsible for the supposed pre planned murder on the British soldier Lee Rigby. In the second half of 2020, the number of user data requests issued to Facebook from the United States amounted to 61,262. This figure was higher than any other country, and India ranked second with 40,300 data requests.

Users spend an average of 19.6 hours per month on TikTok alone. This works out to be approximately 39 minutes per day.

There were 279 809 300 Facebook users in United States of America in April 2025, which accounted for 81.2% of its entire population. The majority of them were women - 53.8%. People aged 25 to 34 were the largest user group (67 700 000). The highest difference between men and women occurs within people aged 65 and above, where women lead by 13 300 000.

YouTube boasts an average of 23.7 hours per month spent by users.

Meta's family of apps continues to dominate the global social media landscape, with 3.43 billion daily active users across its core products in the first quarter of 2025. This represents a slight increase from the previous quarter and underscores the company's enduring influence in connecting people worldwide. Instagram's global reach and demographics Among Meta's portfolio, Instagram stands out with its impressive user base in key markets. India leads with 362 million users, followed by the United States with 169 million and Brazil with 134 million. Messenger and WhatsApp usage trends Meta's messaging apps continue to see robust engagement. Facebook Messenger averaged 394 million daily active users on Android devices between October 2023 and October 2024, with iOS users adding another 175 million on average. Meanwhile, WhatsApp has solidified its position as the leading communication channel for global smartphone users, reaching an estimated three billion unique active users worldwide in June 2024.

There are currently over 1.5 billion active users on TikTok worldwide.

This fileset contains a series of screenshots taken from our facebook advertising account. A few days ago we noticed that some negative "SEO" tactics, for lack of a better term, were having a negative impact on the performance of ads and fan engagement on the facebook page that we've been building.

I developed a custom software package, which utilizes nueural networks I've developed, to identify a target demographic, and suggest advertising content for said target demographic.

After a short training period we were able to create advertisemsents on facebook that averaged a cost of 0.01 cents per like. We also had a fan page engagement of nearly 4 times that of major brands like Wal-Mart.

Shortly after we began to obtain success we started noticing problems with our page. Since we have a stalker issue, we determined that the issues with our page were likely related to him.

We assued this because we had a disproportinately high number of spammy, negative, and inapporpriate comments on our posts. Offline harassment of our staff by the stalker also increased significantly during this time.

Curiously, we believe that the incident with the stalker allowed us to ascertain some interesting observations about Facebook's algorithims, which I've outlined below.

We believe, after reseraching this issue, that Facebook's algorithims suffer from the following issues:

1. They are easily gamed. We think that Facebook's algorithims are hypersensitive to negative comments being made on a post, and conversely likely positive ones as well. If a post is hidden, the comments are negative, or if a user interacts with the post negatively in some way, then Facebook's algorithims will "punish" your page.

2. We think that a series of scripted fake bot accounts would easily cause the issues that we've been expriencing.

As you can see from the data provided, over 90% of our likes come from paid facebook advertisement, therefore we do not have a significant number of fake accounts on our page brought in by third party advertising because we didn't do any of that.

Moreover, we did not send any of our fans obtained via mailing lists, or offline contact to our facebook page, those fans participate with us via email and/or through our private Google+ community.

So it is safe to say that our problems have not been caused by purchasing a large amount of fake likes from any third party vendor.

In addition, because our likes were gained very quickly, at a rate of about 2.5k likes a day, we do not believe that we have suffered from changes in the general demographic of our Facebook fan base over time.

Yet almost immediately after we started expericing trolling issues with our page, we also noticed a dip in the number of fans our posts were shown to by Facebook, and the performance of our ads began to go down, even though the content on our page had not changed.

We attributed this to holes in Facebook's algorithims, and potentially to the excessive use of fake bot accounts by Facebook itself.

We cannot prove the latter satement, but there have been similar reports before. Reference - http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/08/01/facebook-investigating-claims-that-80-of-ad-clicks-come-from-bots/

This article from Forbes outlines how one startup company repoted that up to 80% of their Facebook likes were fake bot accounts even though they paid for advertising directly through Facebook.

Our reserach suggests that Facebook's advertising platform functions as follows: - An advertiser pays for likes with Facebook, and the quality of the content on their page is initially assessed by those who are liking the page, but once the page obtains a following, we believe that the quality of the content is assessed by how many people like the posts on the page directly after they are posted.

If a post gets hidden, marked as spammed, skipped over, whatever, then we beleive that Facebook kicks that post out of the newsfeeds. If this happens to a significant number of posts on the page, then we believe that Facebook places the page on an advertising black-list.

Once on this black-list ads will begin to perform poorly, and content will drop out of newsfeeds causing even the most active page to go silent.

We tested this by posting pictures of attractive blond women, which with our demographic would have normally obtained a large number of likes and we struggled to get even 10 likes at over 20k page likes when we would have previosuly obtained almost 100 likes without boosting at only 5k page likes.

Why this probably isn't seen more often: In most cases this probably takes a while to occur as pages become old and fans grow bored, but in our case, because we have a stalker trolling our page with what appears to be hundres of scripted bot accounts, the effect was seen immediately.

Our data suggests that it became a tug of war between our stalker's army of fake bot accounts (making spammy comments, hiding our posts from newsfeeds, etc) and the real fans that actually like our page (who were voting our conent up - i.e. liking it, etc).

If you look at the graph of page likes in the figures provided - you can see that the darker purple are the fans we obtained via facebook advertising, well over 90%. We believe that the light purple (the "organic" fans) is mostly comprised of our stalker's fake drone accounts. We have less than 20 family members and friends liking our page, when we began this experiment we asked them not to interact with our page or the content.

In conclusion: We still have a lot more work to do, but it is highly likely that many Facebook likes are either scripted bots, and/or that Facebook's "weighting" algorithims are very suceptible to gaming via negative "SEO" tactics. Conversely, they are likely sensitive to gaming via positive "SEO" tactics as well.

Of course we cannot say for certain where the Facebook accounts that like a page come from without acess to their internal systems, but the evidence does strongly suggest that Facebook might be plagued with a large quantity of bot accounts, and that their algorithim has to be sensitive to actions from live users, so that the quality of the content can be easily ascertained. Otherwise it would be pretty easy for an advertiser to game Facebook's system by paying for, and getting, a large quantity of likes for content that is not appealing to any significant group of people.

Again we have to reiterate that we have no solid proof of this, but our data strongly suggests that this is the case.

We have reported the issues to Facebook, but interestingly, after we made it clear that we were going to analyze and investigate the issues with our page, we have been suddenly and incessently plagued with a never ending stream of "technical difficulties" related to our advertising account.

If you'd like to collaborate on this project, please feel free to email me at Jamie@ITSmoleculardesign.com.

Snapchat now boasts over 319 million daily active users. That means it’s one of the most engaging platforms. Snapchat currently has a total user base of 800 million.

The average Twitter user spends 5.1 hours per month on the platform.

In 2022, Facebook had approximately **** million users in Spain, with this number consistently fluctuating above ** million since 2014. Considering that Spain’s population stood at approximately **** million inhabitants in 2022, the popularity of Facebook in Spain cannot be denied, as this figure translates into a penetration of almost **** percent of the country. Social media landscape in Spain Despite a slight decline since 2021, Facebook still is the second most used platform in the country and the biggest when not considering messaging apps. Around ** percent half of Spanish Facebook users checked the social platform at least once or several times a day. As of 2022, around ** percent of the Spanish population used social media, with the primary reason of keeping in touch with closer contacts via messenger apps, the preferred type of platform for around ** percent of the country’s social users. Spain and Facebook: a global comparison With an audience of more than *** million users in India in 2023, Spain might feel like a smaller fish for Facebook, as the country registers an audience almost ** times smaller. The number of monthly active users on Facebook has grown non-stop in the past decade, almost reaching **** billion users worldwide in the first quarter of 2023 compared to only 2.2 billion in the first quarter of 2018. These figures make Mark Zuckerberg’s social network the platform that covers the largest audience in the world.

How many people use social media? Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. In 2024, over **** ******* people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to over *** billion in 2029. Who uses social media? Social networking is one of the most popular digital activities worldwide and it is no surprise that social networking penetration across all regions is constantly increasing. As of January 2023, the global social media usage rate stood at ** percent. This figure is anticipated to grow as lesser developed digital markets catch up with other regions when it comes to infrastructure development and the availability of cheap mobile devices. In fact, most of social media’s global growth is driven by the increasing usage of mobile devices. Mobile-first market Eastern Asia topped the global ranking of mobile social networking penetration, followed by established digital powerhouses such as the Americas and Northern Europe. How much time do people spend on social media? Social media is an integral part of daily internet usage. On average, internet users spend *** minutes per day on social media and messaging apps, an increase of ** minutes since 2015. On average, internet users in Latin America had the highest average time spent per day on social media. What are the most popular social media platforms? Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass *** billion registered accounts and currently boasts approximately *** billion monthly active users, making it the most popular social network worldwide. In June 2023, the top social media apps in the Apple App Store included mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram Messenger, as well as the ever-popular app version of Facebook.

TikTok has 136 million monthly active users in the US alone.