The global social networking services (SNS) market is experiencing robust growth, driven by increasing internet and smartphone penetration, particularly in emerging economies. The market, estimated at $200 billion in 2025, is projected to exhibit a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15% from 2025 to 2033, reaching an estimated $700 billion by 2033. This expansion is fueled by several key trends, including the rise of short-form video platforms like TikTok and YouTube, the increasing integration of social media with e-commerce, and the ongoing development of sophisticated algorithms that personalize user experiences. The market segmentation reveals significant opportunities across diverse application areas, such as photo sharing, video streaming, online music, and business networking. While the general social networking services segment currently dominates, specialized platforms catering to niche interests show strong growth potential. Key players like Facebook, Twitter, Tencent, and TikTok are fiercely competitive, driving innovation and market consolidation. Geographic growth is largely concentrated in Asia-Pacific and other rapidly developing regions, though North America and Europe remain substantial markets. However, challenges exist, including data privacy concerns, the spread of misinformation, and increasing regulatory scrutiny, which could potentially restrain market growth to some degree. The competitive landscape is highly dynamic, with established players continuously adapting to emerging trends and new entrants vying for market share. The increasing demand for interactive and personalized social media experiences is pushing innovation in areas such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) integration, creating new avenues for growth. Furthermore, the integration of social networking services with other digital platforms, like e-commerce and online gaming, creates synergistic opportunities. The market's future growth hinges on addressing the concerns surrounding data security, misinformation, and ethical considerations, while simultaneously capitalizing on the evolving technological landscape and the increasing demand for connectedness. Understanding the evolving user preferences and leveraging advanced analytics will be crucial for success in this competitive market.

Global Social Media Platforms market size is expected to reach $3317.86 billion by 2029 at 34.8%, segmented as by social networking, general social networks (facebook, linkedin), niche social networks

Global Social Networking Services market size 2025 was XX Million. Social Networking Services Industry compound annual growth rate (CAGR) will be XX% from 2025 till 2033.

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.

As of January 2024, #love was the most used hashtag on Instagram, being included in over two billion posts on the social media platform. #Instagood and #instagram were used over one billion times as of early 2024.

As of January 2024, Instagram was slightly more popular with men than women, with men accounting for 50.6 percent of the platform’s global users. Additionally, the social media app was most popular amongst younger audiences, with almost 32 percent of users aged between 18 and 24 years.

              Instagram’s Global Audience

              As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social media platform globally, reaching two billion monthly active users (MAU). This number is projected to keep growing with no signs of slowing down, which is not a surprise as the global online social penetration rate across all regions is constantly increasing.
              As of January 2024, the country with the largest Instagram audience was India with 362.9 million users, followed by the United States with 169.7 million users.

              Who is winning over the generations?

              Even though Instagram’s audience is almost twice the size of TikTok’s on a global scale, TikTok has shown itself to be a fierce competitor, particularly amongst younger audiences. TikTok was the most downloaded mobile app globally in 2022, generating 672 million downloads. As of 2022, Generation Z in the United States spent more time on TikTok than on Instagram monthly.

As part of the project Aging in a Networked Society: Older people, Social Networks and well-being a Social Experiment Study (ANS - SE) was conducted with the aim of assessing the impact of Social Networking Sites (SNS) use on loneliness and social isolation. The study is a randomized controlled trial conducted on people aged 78 and over residing in Abbiategrasso, a town located in the Milan area. The experiment involved 144 people divided into three groups: a treatment group (attendance to a course on SNS use), an active control group (attendance to a course on lifestyle education of older people) and an inactive control group (inclusion in a waiting list). The first dataset (called "esperimento") contains information about a multidimensional assessment received by the participants before and after the intervention. In particular, the assessment covered several dimensions: cognitive functions, general health, loneliness and social isolation. The second dataset (called "follow-up") contains information related to the assessment conducted on 130 subjects one year after the intervention. The assessment entailed also the collection of study members' views and perceptions on the role of ICTs and SNSs in promoting social relationships. The follow-up took place during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic and, although indirectly, it constitutes an interesting resource since it is concerned people particularly exposed to this Coronavirus.

I’ve compiled a list of the latest social media user statistics showing just how big social media has become and where it’s likely to go in the future.

IntroductionAdolescents are in the transitional stage from childhood to adulthood, a critical period for individual physical and mental development. With the rapid development of the Internet, social networking has become an integral part of adolescents’ daily lives. However, the information that adolescents are exposed to on social networks is often processed and embellished, which may cause them to become physically dissatisfied and lead to emotional problems, such as depression. We investigated the chain-mediating effects of self-objectification and body satisfaction on the relationship between social network use and depression.MethodsWe utilized questionnaire data of 2025 adolescents from two secondary schools and one high school in China.ResultsOur results demonstrated that (1) there are obvious sex differences in the intensity of social network use and active and passive social network use among adolescents, with usage higher among girls than for boys; (2) self-objectification and body satisfaction play a mediating role in the relationship between the intensity of social network use and adolescent depression, as well as the presence of chain-mediating roles; and (3) self-objectification and body satisfaction play an intermediary role in the relationship between active and passive social network use and adolescent depression; there is further a chain intermediary role. The findings suggest that social network use affects adolescents’ depression through self-objectification and body satisfaction, which is not only manifested in the general use intensity of social networks but also in their active and passive use modes of social networks.ConclusionThis study provides theoretical support for the causes and mechanisms behind the influence of social network use on adolescent depression and has practical implications for the prevention and intervention of adolescent emotional problems.

As of April 2024, Facebook had an addressable ad audience reach 131.1 percent in Libya, followed by the United Arab Emirates with 120.5 percent and Mongolia with 116 percent. Additionally, the Philippines and Qatar had addressable ad audiences of 114.5 percent and 111.7 percent.

This work focuses on the efficiency of the knowledge distillation approach in generating a lightweight yet powerful BERT-based model for natural language processing (NLP) applications. After the model creation, we applied the resulting model, LastBERT, to a real-world task—classifying severity levels of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)-related concerns from social media text data. Referring to LastBERT, a customized student BERT model, we significantly lowered model parameters from 110 million BERT base to 29 million-resulting in a model approximately 73.64% smaller. On the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, comprising paraphrase identification, sentiment analysis, and text classification, the student model maintained strong performance across many tasks despite this reduction. The model was also used on a real-world ADHD dataset with an accuracy of 85%, F1 score of 85%, precision of 85%, and recall of 85%. When compared to DistilBERT (66 million parameters) and ClinicalBERT (110 million parameters), LastBERT demonstrated comparable performance, with DistilBERT slightly outperforming it at 87%, and ClinicalBERT achieving 86% across the same metrics. These findings highlight the LastBERT model’s capacity to classify degrees of ADHD severity properly, so it offers a useful tool for mental health professionals to assess and comprehend material produced by users on social networking platforms. The study emphasizes the possibilities of knowledge distillation to produce effective models fit for use in resource-limited conditions, hence advancing NLP and mental health diagnosis. Furthermore underlined by the considerable decrease in model size without appreciable performance loss is the lower computational resources needed for training and deployment, hence facilitating greater applicability. Especially using readily available computational tools like Google Colab and Kaggle Notebooks. This study shows the accessibility and usefulness of advanced NLP methods in pragmatic world applications.

Global ad spend were expected to reach over $134 billion in 2022. This means that it has increased by over 17% yearly.

Gowalla is a location-based social networking website where users share their locations by checking-in. The friendship network is undirected and was collected using their public API, and consists of 196,591 nodes and 950,327 edges. We have collected a total of 6,442,890 check-ins of these users over the period of Feb. 2009 - Oct. 2010.

Brightkite was once a location-based social networking service provider where users shared their locations by checking-in. The friendship network was collected using their public API, and consists of 58,228 nodes and 214,078 edges. The network is originally directed but we have constructed a network with undirected edges when there is a friendship in both ways. We have also collected a total of 4,491,143 checkins of these users over the period of Apr. 2008 - Oct. 2010.

Stanford Network Analysis Platform (SNAP) is a general purpose, high performance system for analysis and manipulation of large networks. Graphs consists of nodes and directed/undirected/multiple edges between the graph nodes. Networks are graphs with data on nodes and/or edges of the network.

The core SNAP library is written in C++ and optimized for maximum performance and compact graph representation. It easily scales to massive networks with hundreds of millions of nodes, and billions of edges. It efficiently manipulates large graphs, calculates structural properties, generates regular and random graphs, and supports attributes on nodes and edges. Besides scalability to large graphs, an additional strength of SNAP is that nodes, edges and attributes in a graph or a network can be changed dynamically during the computation.

SNAP was originally developed by Jure Leskovec in the course of his PhD studies. The first release was made available in Nov, 2009. SNAP uses a general purpose STL (Standard Template Library)-like library GLib developed at Jozef Stefan Institute. SNAP and GLib are being actively developed and used in numerous academic and industrial projects.

https://snap.stanford.edu/data/index.html

These are the key social media statistics that you need to know.

Which countries spent the most and least time on social media?

Social media addiction statistics show that over 210 million people worldwide suffer from social media addiction.

Background: Problematic smartphone use (PSU) has been associated with screen time in general, but little is known about the effect of different screen-based activities. We examined the associations of self-reported time spent on overall and specific screen-based activities with PSU and its addictive symptoms in Hong Kong Chinese adults.Methods: We analyzed data from 562 smartphone owners (56.5% female; 82.1% aged 25–64 years) in a population-based telephone survey in 2017. PSU was measured using Smartphone Addiction Scale-Short Version (range 10–60) which includes symptoms of daily-life disturbance, withdrawal, cyberspace-oriented relationship, overuse, and tolerance. Screen time was self-reported as average hours per day spent on the internet, online book/newspaper/magazine, online video, and social networking sites (SNS). Multivariable linear regression analyzed the associations of self-reported screen time with PSU severity and symptoms. Interaction effects of sex, age group, educational attainment, and monthly household income were examined.Results: Self-reported time spent on overall screen-based activities was associated with PSU severity (β = 1.35, 95% CI 0.15, 2.55) and withdrawal and overuse symptoms, after adjusting for sociodemographic and health-related variables. Independent association was observed for self-reported SNS time with PSU severity (β = 1.42, 95% CI 0.35, 2.49) and symptoms of withdrawal and cyberspace-oriented relationship, after mutually adjusting for time on other activities. The strongest association between self-reported SNS time and PSU severity was observed in younger than older adults (β = 4.36, 95% CI 2.58, 6.13; P for interaction = 0.004).Conclusions: The independent association of self-reported SNS time with PSU and core addictive symptoms highlighted the addiction potential of SNS use, particularly in younger users.

The results might surprise you when looking at internet users that are active on social media in each country.

As of February 2025, it was found that men between the ages of 25 and 34 years made up Facebook's largest audience, accounting for 18.5 percent of global users. Additionally, Facebook's second-largest audience base could be found with men aged 18 to 24 years. Facebook connects the world Founded in 2004 and going public in 2012, Facebook is one of the biggest internet companies in the world with influence that goes beyond social media. It is widely considered as one of the Big Four tech companies, along with Google, Apple, and Amazon (all together known under the acronym GAFA). Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide and the company also owns three other billion-user properties: mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, as well as photo-sharing app Instagram. Facebook usersThe vast majority of Facebook users connect to the social network via mobile devices. This is unsurprising, as Facebook has many users in mobile-first online markets. Currently, India ranks first in terms of Facebook audience size with 378 million users. The United States, Brazil, and Indonesia also all have more than 100 million Facebook users each.

Facebook and YouTube are still the most used social media platforms today.