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.

How much time do people spend on social media? As of 2024, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 143 minutes per day, down from 151 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 three hours and 49 minutes on social media each day. In comparison, the daily time spent with social media in the U.S. was just two 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.

How many people use social media? Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. In 2024, over five billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to over six billion in 2028.

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 59 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 151 minutes per day on social media and messaging apps, an increase of 40 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 one billion registered accounts and currently boasts approximately 2.9 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.

Gen Z and Millennials are the biggest social media users of all age groups.

56.8% of the world’s total population is active on social media.

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

Social media platforms are integral to people's lives, offering ways to communicate, create and view content and share information. According to Ofcom, approximately 89% of UK internet users in 2023 used social media apps or sites. Teenagers and young adults are the biggest users, although there is rapid uptake among older age groups. Advertising is the primary revenue source for social media platforms, although subscription-based services are gaining momentum as platforms seek to diversify their incomes. TikTok is the success story of the last few years, becoming the most downloaded app between 2020 and 2022, according to Apptopia. The short-form video platform reported that it averaged revenue growth of over 450% between 2019 and 2022. After Musk's takeover, X, formerly known as Twitter, adjusted its content moderation and allowed previously banned accounts to return. As a result, over 600 advertisers have pulled their ads from the site because of fears their brand may be associated with malcontent. In response to falling ad revenue, X has introduced a subscription-based service which enables users to verify themselves and boosts the number of people who view their tweets. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram have responded by introducing a similar service. Revenue is expected to grow by 14.3% in 2024-25, constrained by a slowdown in user growth for most major social media platforms. Over the five years through 2024-25, revenue is forecast to expand at a compound annual rate of 32.8% to reach £9.8 billion. Looking forward, regulations relating to how data is collected, stored, and shared will force advertisers and platforms to rethink how they can target their desired demographics. The rising prominence of AI will require the introduction of adequate regulations. The Online Safety Bill sets out new guidelines for social media platforms to abide by, with hefty fines in store for those who do not. Operating costs will swell as platforms look to meet consumers’ expectations, weighing on profit. Over the five years through 2029-30, social media platforms' revenue is projected to climb at an estimated 9.4% to reach £15.4 billion.

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

As of January 2025, 78 percent of social media users in the United States aged 40 to 49 years were users of Facebook, as were 75 percent of 30 to 39 year olds in the country. Overall, 66 percent of those aged 18 to 29 years were using Instagram in the U.S. The social media market in the United States The number of social media users in the United States has shown continuous growth in the past years, and it is forecast to continue increasing to reach 342 million users in 2029. As of 2023, the social network user penetration in the United States amounted to an impressive 91.56 percent, meaning that more than nine in ten people in the country engaged with online platforms. Furthermore, Facebook was by far the most popular social media platform in the United States, accounting for 45 percent of all social media visits in 2023, followed by Pinterest with 21.2 percent of visits. The global social media landscape As of April 2024, 5.07 billion people were social media users, accounting for 62.6 percent of the world’s population. Northern Europe was the region with the highest social media penetration rate with a reach of 80.2 percent, followed by Western Europe with 78.2 percent and Eastern Asia 74.9 percent. In contrast, less than one in ten people in Middle Africa used social networks. Facebook’s popularity is not limited to the United States: this network leads the market on a global scale, and it accumulated more than three billion monthly active users (MAU) as of 2024, which is far more any other social media platform. 272014 YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp followed, all with two billion or more MAU.

Twitter user statistics show a varying degree of how often users login to the platform. Here’s what it looks like.

Over 210 million people worldwide suffer from social media addiction.

The number of social media users in the United States was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by in total 26 million users (+8.55 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the social media user base is estimated to reach 330.07 million users and therefore a new peak in 2029. Notably, the number of social media users of was continuously increasing over the past years.The shown figures regarding social media users have been derived from survey data that has been processed to estimate missing demographics.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).

Greece - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks was 68.67% in December of 2024, according to the EUROSTAT. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for Greece - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks - last updated from the EUROSTAT on June of 2025. Historically, Greece - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks reached a record high of 68.67% in December of 2024 and a record low of 28.06% in December of 2011.

Ireland - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks was 74.50% in December of 2024, according to the EUROSTAT. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for Ireland - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks - last updated from the EUROSTAT on June of 2025. Historically, Ireland - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks reached a record high of 74.50% in December of 2024 and a record low of 40.27% in December of 2011.

Youtube social network and ground-truth communities Dataset information Youtube is a video-sharing web site that includes a social network. In the Youtube social network, users form friendship each other and users can create groups which other users can join. We consider such user-defined groups as ground-truth communities. This data is provided by Alan Mislove et al.

We regard each connected component in a group as a separate ground-truth community. We remove the ground-truth communities which have less than 3 nodes. We also provide the top 5,000 communities with highest quality which are described in our paper. As for the network, we provide the largest connected component.

more info : https://snap.stanford.edu/data/com-Youtube.html

Today the average time spent on social media is 2 hours and 24 minutes today for people aged 16 to 64.

This is an Instagram social network data for Influence Maximization (IM) task. It was collected from Instagram on April to May 2020, from the followers of 24 private universities in Malaysia, using Instagram API and various third-party Instagram websites. It consists of mostly Malaysian users, with 70,409 nodes/users, 1,007,107 edges/connections (followees and followers). Please kindly cite the following paper upon usage of this dataset:

Authors: Kristo Radion Purba; David Asirvatham; Raja Kumar Murugesan
Title: Influence Maximization Diffusion Models Based On Engagement and Activeness on Instagram
Journal: Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences
Year: 2020
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2020.09.012

Romania - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks was 74.89% in December of 2024, according to the EUROSTAT. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for Romania - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks - last updated from the EUROSTAT on May of 2025. Historically, Romania - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks reached a record high of 75.24% in December of 2023 and a record low of 25.07% in December of 2011.

The Observatory Knowledge Graph (OKG) is a knowledge graph with tweets on inequality in terms of the OBIO ontology (https://w3id.org/okg/obio-ontology/), which integrates social media metadata with various types of linguistic knowledge. The OKG can be used as the backbone of a social media observatory, to facilitate a deeper understanding of social media discourse on inequality.

We retrieved tweets and retweets published from the end (30th) of May 2020 to the beginning (1st) of May 2023.

In this version of the OKG, we use a sample of 85,247 tweets, published from May 30th to August 27th, 2020. To be compliant with Twitter's policies, we remove usernames and id's, as well as the tweet texts and sentences. We also replace user IRIs with skolem IRIs through skolemization.

Access to the OKG as well as the SPARQL endpoint can be requested by sending a mail to the contact person (l.stork@uva.nl) with the following information:

1. A description of the use case
2. Affiliation of the researchers involved
3. How their work is in line with Twitter's policies: https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/policy#4-d

Czech Republic - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks was 70.24% in December of 2024, according to the EUROSTAT. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for Czech Republic - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks - last updated from the EUROSTAT on May of 2025. Historically, Czech Republic - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks reached a record high of 70.24% in December of 2024 and a record low of 26.66% in December of 2011.