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.

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.

As of April 2024, around 16.5 percent of global active Instagram users were men between the ages of 18 and 24 years. More than half of the global Instagram population worldwide was aged 34 years or younger.

              Teens and social media

              As one of the biggest social networks worldwide, Instagram is especially popular with teenagers. As of fall 2020, the photo-sharing app ranked third in terms of preferred social network among teenagers in the United States, second to Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was one of the most influential advertising channels among female Gen Z users when making purchasing decisions. Teens report feeling more confident, popular, and better about themselves when using social media, and less lonely, depressed and anxious.
              Social media can have negative effects on teens, which is also much more pronounced on those with low emotional well-being. It was found that 35 percent of teenagers with low social-emotional well-being reported to have experienced cyber bullying when using social media, while in comparison only five percent of teenagers with high social-emotional well-being stated the same. As such, social media can have a big impact on already fragile states of mind.

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.

General data recollected for the studio " Analysis of the Quantitative Impact of Social Networks on Web Traffic of Cybermedia in the 27 Countries of the European Union". Four research questions are posed: what percentage of the total web traffic generated by cybermedia in the European Union comes from social networks? Is said percentage higher or lower than that provided through direct traffic and through the use of search engines via SEO positioning? Which social networks have a greater impact? And is there any degree of relationship between the specific weight of social networks in the web traffic of a cybermedia and circumstances such as the average duration of the user's visit, the number of page views or the bounce rate understood in its formal aspect of not performing any kind of interaction on the visited page beyond reading its content? To answer these questions, we have first proceeded to a selection of the cybermedia with the highest web traffic of the 27 countries that are currently part of the European Union after the United Kingdom left on December 31, 2020. In each nation we have selected five media using a combination of the global web traffic metrics provided by the tools Alexa (https://www.alexa.com/), which ceased to be operational on May 1, 2022, and SimilarWeb (https:// www.similarweb.com/). We have not used local metrics by country since the results obtained with these first two tools were sufficiently significant and our objective is not to establish a ranking of cybermedia by nation but to examine the relevance of social networks in their web traffic. In all cases, cybermedia whose property corresponds to a journalistic company have been selected, ruling out those belonging to telecommunications portals or service providers; in some cases they correspond to classic information companies (both newspapers and televisions) while in others they refer to digital natives, without this circumstance affecting the nature of the research proposed.
Below we have proceeded to examine the web traffic data of said cybermedia. The period corresponding to the months of October, November and December 2021 and January, February and March 2022 has been selected. We believe that this six-month stretch allows possible one-time variations to be overcome for a month, reinforcing the precision of the data obtained. To secure this data, we have used the SimilarWeb tool, currently the most precise tool that exists when examining the web traffic of a portal, although it is limited to that coming from desktops and laptops, without taking into account those that come from mobile devices, currently impossible to determine with existing measurement tools on the market. It includes:

Web traffic general data: average visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rate Web traffic origin by country Percentage of traffic generated from social media over total web traffic Distribution of web traffic generated from social networks Comparison of web traffic generated from social netwoks with direct and search procedures

Which county has the most Facebook users?

              There are more than 378 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 193.8 million, 119.05 million, and 112.55 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.

ABSTRACT

The Albero study analyzes the personal transitions of a cohort of high school students at the end of their studies. The data consist of (a) the longitudinal social network of the students, before (n = 69) and after (n = 57) finishing their studies; and (b) the longitudinal study of the personal networks of each of the participants in the research. The two observations of the complete social network are presented in two matrices in Excel format. For each respondent, two square matrices of 45 alters of their personal networks are provided, also in Excel format. For each respondent, both psychological sense of community and frequency of commuting is provided in a SAV file (SPSS). The database allows the combined analysis of social networks and personal networks of the same set of individuals.

INTRODUCTION

Ecological transitions are key moments in the life of an individual that occur as a result of a change of role or context. This is the case, for example, of the completion of high school studies, when young people start their university studies or try to enter the labor market. These transitions are turning points that carry a risk or an opportunity (Seidman & French, 2004). That is why they have received special attention in research and psychological practice, both from a developmental point of view and in the situational analysis of stress or in the implementation of preventive strategies.

The data we present in this article describe the ecological transition of a group of young people from Alcala de Guadaira, a town located about 16 kilometers from Seville. Specifically, in the “Albero” study we monitored the transition of a cohort of secondary school students at the end of the last pre-university academic year. It is a turning point in which most of them began a metropolitan lifestyle, with more displacements to the capital and a slight decrease in identification with the place of residence (Maya-Jariego, Holgado & Lubbers, 2018).

Normative transitions, such as the completion of studies, affect a group of individuals simultaneously, so they can be analyzed both individually and collectively. From an individual point of view, each student stops attending the institute, which is replaced by new interaction contexts. Consequently, the structure and composition of their personal networks are transformed. From a collective point of view, the network of friendships of the cohort of high school students enters into a gradual process of disintegration and fragmentation into subgroups (Maya-Jariego, Lubbers & Molina, 2019).

These two levels, individual and collective, were evaluated in the “Albero” study. One of the peculiarities of this database is that we combine the analysis of a complete social network with a survey of personal networks in the same set of individuals, with a longitudinal design before and after finishing high school. This allows combining the study of the multiple contexts in which each individual participates, assessed through the analysis of a sample of personal networks (Maya-Jariego, 2018), with the in-depth analysis of a specific context (the relationships between a promotion of students in the institute), through the analysis of the complete network of interactions. This potentially allows us to examine the covariation of the social network with the individual differences in the structure of personal networks.

PARTICIPANTS

The social network and personal networks of the students of the last two years of high school of an institute of Alcala de Guadaira (Seville) were analyzed. The longitudinal follow-up covered approximately a year and a half. The first wave was composed of 31 men (44.9%) and 38 women (55.1%) who live in Alcala de Guadaira, and who mostly expect to live in Alcala (36.2%) or in Seville (37.7%) in the future. In the second wave, information was obtained from 27 men (47.4%) and 30 women (52.6%).

DATE STRUCTURE AND ARCHIVES FORMAT

The data is organized in two longitudinal observations, with information on the complete social network of the cohort of students of the last year, the personal networks of each individual and complementary information on the sense of community and frequency of metropolitan movements, among other variables.

Social network

The file “Red_Social_t1.xlsx” is a valued matrix of 69 actors that gathers the relations of knowledge and friendship between the cohort of students of the last year of high school in the first observation. The file “Red_Social_t2.xlsx” is a valued matrix of 57 actors obtained 17 months after the first observation.

The data is organized in two longitudinal observations, with information on the complete social network of the cohort of students of the last year, the personal networks of each individual and complementary information on the sense of community and frequency of metropolitan movements, among other variables.

In order to generate each complete social network, the list of 77 students enrolled in the last year of high school was passed to the respondents, asking that in each case they indicate the type of relationship, according to the following values: 1, “his/her name sounds familiar"; 2, "I know him/her"; 3, "we talk from time to time"; 4, "we have good relationship"; and 5, "we are friends." The two resulting complete networks are represented in Figure 2. In the second observation, it is a comparatively less dense network, reflecting the gradual disintegration process that the student group has initiated.

Personal networks

Also in this case the information is organized in two observations. The compressed file “Redes_Personales_t1.csv” includes 69 folders, corresponding to personal networks. Each folder includes a valued matrix of 45 alters in CSV format. Likewise, in each case a graphic representation of the network obtained with Visone (Brandes and Wagner, 2004) is included. Relationship values range from 0 (do not know each other) to 2 (know each other very well).

Second, the compressed file “Redes_Personales_t2.csv” includes 57 folders, with the information equivalent to each respondent referred to the second observation, that is, 17 months after the first interview. The structure of the data is the same as in the first observation.

Sense of community and metropolitan displacements

The SPSS file “Albero.sav” collects the survey data, together with some information-summary of the network data related to each respondent. The 69 rows correspond to the 69 individuals interviewed, and the 118 columns to the variables related to each of them in T1 and T2, according to the following list:

 • Socio-economic data.


 • Data on habitual residence.


 • Information on intercity journeys.


 • Identity and sense of community.


 • Personal network indicators.


 • Social network indicators.

DATA ACCESS

Social networks and personal networks are available in CSV format. This allows its use directly with UCINET, Visone, Pajek or Gephi, among others, and they can be exported as Excel or text format files, to be used with other programs.

The visual representation of the personal networks of the respondents in both waves is available in the following album of the Graphic Gallery of Personal Networks on Flickr: .

In previous work we analyzed the effects of personal networks on the longitudinal evolution of the socio-centric network. It also includes additional details about the instruments applied. In case of using the data, please quote the following reference:

Maya-Jariego, I., Holgado, D. & Lubbers, M. J. (2018). Efectos de la estructura de las redes personales en la red sociocéntrica de una cohorte de estudiantes en transición de la enseñanza secundaria a la universidad. Universitas Psychologica, 17(1), 86-98. https://doi.org/10.11144/Javeriana.upsy17-1.eerp

The English version of this article can be downloaded from: https://tinyurl.com/yy9s2byl

CONCLUSION

The database of the “Albero” study allows us to explore the co-evolution of social networks and personal networks. In this way, we can examine the mutual dependence of individual trajectories and the structure of the relationships of the cohort of students as a whole. The complete social network corresponds to the same context of interaction: the secondary school. However, personal networks collect information from the different contexts in which the individual participates. The structural properties of personal networks may partly explain individual differences in the position of each student in the entire social network. In turn, the properties of the entire social network partly determine the structure of opportunities in which individual trajectories are displayed.

The longitudinal character and the combination of the personal networks of individuals with a common complete social network, make this database have unique characteristics. It may be of interest both for multi-level analysis and for the study of individual differences.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The fieldwork for this study was supported by the Complementary Actions of the Ministry of Education and Science (SEJ2005-25683), and was part of the project “Dynamics of actors and networks across levels: individuals, groups, organizations and social settings” (2006 -2009) of the European Science Foundation (ESF). The data was presented for the first time on June 30, 2009, at the European Research Collaborative Project Meeting on Dynamic Analysis of Networks and Behaviors, held at the Nuffield College of the University of Oxford.

REFERENCES

Brandes, U., & Wagner, D. (2004). Visone - Analysis and Visualization of Social Networks. In M. Jünger, & P. Mutzel (Eds.), Graph Drawing Software (pp. 321-340). New York: Springer-Verlag.

Maya-Jariego, I. (2018). Why name generators with a fixed number of alters may be a pragmatic option for personal network analysis. American Journal of

"This unit is a replication of a 1985 General Social Survey question set on social networks. It asks Rs to list the persons with whom they have 'discussed important matters' over the past six months. A series of questions is then asked about each of the first five persons mentioned. Questions include information about if/how the alters are related to each other; their sex, race, religious preference, and education; how long R has known them; R's closeness to each; how often R talks to each. A dded to the GSS questions is a question which asks what R talks about with each alter. Wording for this question was adapted from Ronald Burt, Social Networks, 1984, vol. 6, pp. 293-339." No standard scoring.

To better understand the composition of Americans' core friendship networks, the "https://www.prri.org/" Target="_blank">Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) designed a study to assess the scope and diversity of Americans' social relationships. The method of measuring Americans' core social networks was modeled after the General Social Survey and follows up on a study PRRI conducted in 2013. The survey was made possible through the generous support of the Fetzer Institute. Additionally, this work was made possible through the support of New Pluralists Collaborative, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The survey was conducted among a representative sample of 5,042 adults (age 18 and up) living in all 50 states in the United States, who are part of Ipsos's Knowledge Panel and an additional 419 who were recruited by Ipsos using opt-in survey panels to increase the sample sizes in smaller states. Interviews were conducted online between March 11 and 30, 2022.

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

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.

As of April 2024, almost 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 18 and 24 years, and 30.6 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 16 percent of users belonged to the 35 to 44 year age group.

              Instagram users

              With roughly one billion monthly active users, Instagram belongs to the most popular social networks worldwide. The social photo sharing app is especially popular in India and in the United States, which have respectively 362.9 million and 169.7 million Instagram users each.

              Instagram features

              One of the most popular features of Instagram is Stories. Users can post photos and videos to their Stories stream and the content is live for others to view for 24 hours before it disappears. In January 2019, the company reported that there were 500 million daily active Instagram Stories users. Instagram Stories directly competes with Snapchat, another photo sharing app that initially became famous due to it’s “vanishing photos” feature.
              As of the second quarter of 2021, Snapchat had 293 million daily active users.

In a world where complex networks are an increasingly important part of science, it is interesting to question how the new reading of social realities they provide applies to our cultural background and in particular, popular culture. Are authors of successful novels able to reproduce social networks faithful to the ones found in reality? Is there any common trend connecting an author's oeuvre, or a genre of fiction? Such an analysis could provide new insight on how we, as a culture, perceive human interactions and consume media. The purpose of the work presented in this paper is to define the signature of a novel's story based on the topological analysis of its social network of characters. For this purpose, an automated tool was built that analyses the dialogs in novels, identifies characters and computes their relationships in a time-dependent manner in order to assess the network's evolution over the course of the story.

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

This dataset contains ~11M tweets related to the 2019 United Kingdom General Election, published and collected between November 12, 2019, and December 12, 2019. In addition, we provide nodes and edges of the superspreader user similarity network, as described in the paper below.

Please, refer to the paper below for more details.

Nizzoli, L., Tardelli, S., Avvenuti, M., Cresci, S., & Tesconi, M. (2021). Coordinated Behavior on Social Media in 2019 UK General Election. In 15th International Conference on Web and Social Media. AAAI.

In detail, the dataset consists of:

• tweet-ids.csv.zip: a CSV file with the column "tweet_id," containing 11,264,820 tweet IDs related to the 2019 United Kingdom General Election, published and collected between November 12, 2019, and December 12, 2019.
• superspreader-nodes.csv.zip: a CSV file with the columns "id" and "cluster," relating to the nodes of the superspreader user similarity network mentioned in the paper.
• superspreader-edges.csv.zip: a CSV file with the columns "source," "target," and "weight," relating to the edges of the superspreader user similarity network mentioned in the paper.

"Sent private messages" and "Liked posts by other users or followed people" are the top two answers among U.S. consumers in our survey on the subject of "Most common social media activities".The survey was conducted online among ****** respondents in the United States, in 2025.

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

The Catalogue of web portals of the Xunta de Galicia constitutes the tool that allows to collect the general information, characteristics and general properties of the portals and social and participative web services whose ownership, management and administration corresponds to the organs or units of the General Administration and of the regional public sector of Galicia in the exercise of their competences. Its content serves as the basis for the publication on the institutional website of the Catalogue of the Integrated Internet Presence Network (A-Z), as indicated by Law 4/2019, of 17 July, on the digital administration of Galicia. The .csv file contains the relationship of the social networks that are part of the current catalog, with the identification of the organization to which they belong and the thematic area(s) to which they are assigned.

The 2020 GSS on Social Identity interviewed individuals 15 years and over in Canada's ten provinces and was conducted from August 2020 to February 2021. The interviews were conducted via self-assisted electronic questionnaire (respondent EQ, or rEQ) and by telephone via interviewer-assisted electronic questionnaire (interviewer EQ, or iEQ, formerly known as Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI)). Data are subject to both sampling and non-sampling errors. These topics are discussed in detail in this guide. The 2020 SI survey is the fourth cycle of the GSS to collect data on social identity, social engagement, and social networks. The previous iteration of the survey (Cycle 27 - Social Identity) was collected in 2013, the second was Cycle 22 - Social Networks in 2008, and the first was Cycle 17 - Social Engagement in 2003.