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.

In May 2025, X, formerly known as Twitter, held a market share of around 42.66 percent in Hong Kong's social media scene in terms of pageviews across all devices, followed by Facebook and YouTube. The American social news and discussion website Reddit has gained traction since the anti-government protests in the city in 2020. Facebook is losing ground A few years before 2017, Facebook controlled over 80 percent of the social media arena in Hong Kong. The drastic change started in 2018, when the networking site lost nearly 11 percentage points and another 19 percentage points in the following year. For many Gen Z and Millennials in the financial hub, Instagram became the favorite social media platform and YouTube was used more often than Facebook. Facebook was still the second place to go after Instagram for product research, it has been losing its appeal among young users and advertisers. Platforms claiming the new spots When it came to advertising audience size, X took the lead. YouTube came in second, however, its ad reach in Hong Kong was among the lowest in the Asia-Pacific region. In comparison, the fourth placeholder Instagram has been picking up steam, reaching 51.6 percent of internet users in Hong Kong. However, the biggest industry threat was TikTok, the most downloaded social media app in Hong Kong as of the time of writing. TikTok’s rising popularity among teenage users may probably change the game of video consumption.

This statistic shows the number of social media users in Hong Kong between 2018 and 2023, with projections up until 2029. In 2023, there were around **** million social media users in Hong Kong and the number was expected to approach *** million by 2029.

Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share: All Platforms: Mixi data was reported at 0.000 % in 25 May 2024. This stayed constant from the previous number of 0.000 % for 24 May 2024. Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share: All Platforms: Mixi data is updated daily, averaging 0.000 % from May 2024 (Median) to 25 May 2024, with 8 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 0.060 % in 22 May 2024 and a record low of 0.000 % in 25 May 2024. Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share: All Platforms: Mixi data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Statcounter Global Stats. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Hong Kong SAR (China) – Table HK.SC.IU: Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share.

According to a survey conducted by Rakuten Insight in Hong Kong in 2025 on social commerce, among respondents aged 35 to 44, ******** was the most used social media for online purchasing during the last 12 months. In contrast, ********* was more popular among respondents under the age of 25.

A 2024 survey found that about ** percent of Hong Kong respondents voted WhatsApp to be their favorite platform among all social media and messaging apps. Instagram and Facebook were head-to-head in the second and third places, each receiving less than ** percent of responses.

This statistic presents the social networking reach in Hong Kong from 2018 to 2023, with projections up to 2029. In 2023, around **** percent of the population in Hong Kong used social media. In 2029, this share is projected to reach ** percent.

In April 2025, *********was the most downloaded free app in the social media category in Hong Kong with a monthly installations of over ** thousand. Meta (the rebrand name of Facebook) claimed sixth out of top ten free social media apps in Hong Kong in that month.

Principal Investigator: Dr KU Yee Lai, Kelly Institution/Think Tank: Hong Kong Baptist University Five years after completion of the research projects granted under the PPR Funding Scheme, quantitative empirical data generated from the research would be released to the public. Only research raw data (e.g. surveys) of completed projects that are provided in file format of comma-separated values (CSV) will be uploaded under the Open Data Plan. Raw data provided in formats other than CSV will only be uploaded onto the scheme’s webpage. PPR Funding Scheme’s webpage: https://www.cepu.gov.hk/en/PRFS/research_report.html Users of the data sets archived are required to acknowledge the research team and the Government. [Remarks: Parts of the data sets archived may contain Chinese/English version only.]

China Retail Investor Sentiment Analytics provides sentiment analytics of Chinese retail investors based on 2 stock forums, Guba (GACRIS dataset) and Xueqiu (XACRIS dataset), the most popular stock forums in China from 2007.

By utilizing in-house NLP models which are dedicatedly optimized for Chinese stock forum posts and trained on a proprietary manually labeled and cross-checked training data, the dataset provides accurate text analytics of post content, including but not limited to quality, sentiment, and relevant stocks with relevance score. In addition to the aggregated statistics of stock sentiment and popularity, the dataset also provides rich and fine-grained information for each user/post in record level. For example, it reports the registration time, number of followers for each user, and also the replies/readings and province being published for each post. Moreover, these meta data are processed in point-in-Time (PIT) manner since 2019.

The dataset could help clients easily capture the sentiment and popularity among millions of Chinese retail investors. On the other hand, it also offers flexibility for clients to customize novel analytics, such as studying the sentiment (conformity/divergence) of users of different level of influence or posts of different hotness, or simply filtering the posts published by users which are too active/positive/negative in a time window when aggregating the statistics.

Coverage: All A-share and Hong Kong stocks, 300+ popular US stocks Update Frequency: Daily or intra-day

These are the raw results of a survey examining the attitudes of Hong Kong students towards the use of targeted promotion on Facebook. It was conducted by librarians at City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University from 20-26 Jan 2017. A total of 1,131 responses were received.

Microdata of the ANTIELAB Research Data Archive - Mobilization Map

Field definition (event.csv):

event-id: an unique event identifier date: date of the event time: hour of a day of the event link: url link(s) to the call for action posts on the Telegram channel type: type of the event district: one of the 18 Hong Kong districts (in Chinese) location1-13: specific locations identified in the post(s) (in Chinese)

The shape file contains the WSG84 coordinates of each of the identified locations of every event. You can look up the geographical coordinates of the events by matching the field ‘event_id’ in the shape file with that in the CSV file. The coordinates are provided by Google’s Geocoding API and Place API.

December 7, 2022: This updated version fixes a data format issue occurred when exporting the coordinates to the data repository. It also makes the date format of the events consistent to avoid user’s misidentification. These changes do not affect the analysis and the results of the original paper.

Reference: Teo, E., Fu, KW. A novel systematic approach of constructing protests repertoires from social media: comparing the roles of organizational and non-organizational actors in social movement. J Comput Soc Sc (2021). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42001-021-00101-3

In May 2025, WeChat was the highest grossing social media app in Hong Kong, earning almost *** thousand U.S. dollars of revenue. *** out of the *** highest-earning social media apps in Hong Kong were online dating platforms.

Welcome to the Open Weiboscope Data Access website. Weiboscope is a data collection and visualization project developed by the research team at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong (JMSC). One of the objectives of the project is to make censored Sina Weibo posts of a selected group of Chinese microbloggers publicly accessible, which enables academic use of the data for better understanding of the social media in China and making the Chinese media system more transparent. Since January 2011, the project has been regularly sampling timelines of more than 350,000 Chinese microbloggers who have more than 1,000 followers. The methodology has been detailed in an IEEE Internet Computing article (Fu, Chan, Chau, 2013). Besides, we have sampled Sina Weibo accounts randomly since 2012 and the samples' most recent timeline were collected and stored into the dataset. Our sampling approach is reported in a PLOS ONE article (Fu, Chau, 2013). This site contains all the Weiboscope data collected in the year 2012. We are delighted to share the data for open access. But for ethical reason, the data are anonymized, i.e. real user and message id are replaced by pseudo ID. When using the data, please cite the paper below. King-wa Fu, CH Chan, Michael Chau. Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and Impact Evaluation of the 'Real Name Registration' Policy. IEEE Internet Computing. 2013; 17(3): 42-50. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2013.28 Data Set Statistics: Number of weibo messages: 226841122 Number of deleted messages: 10865955 Number of censored ('Permission Denied') messages: 86083 Number of unique weibo users: 14387628 Enquiry: Send your question/comment to weiboscope@gmail.com. The project is funded by the University of Hong Kong Seed Funding Program for Basic Research.Citation:Fu KW, Chan CH, Chau M. Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and the Real-Name Registration Policy. Internet Computing, IEEE. 2013; 17(3): 42-50.

According to a survey conducted by Rakuten Insight in Hong Kong in 2025 on social commerce, Facebook was the most popular social media for online purchasing during the last 12 months. Approximately ** percent of female respondents and ** percent of male respondents stated that they have used Facebook to buy things.

Japan Info Needs Before Departure: Hong Kong: Social Network data was reported at 112.000 Person in Mar 2018. This records an increase from the previous number of 44.000 Person for Dec 2017. Japan Info Needs Before Departure: Hong Kong: Social Network data is updated quarterly, averaging 28.000 Person from Mar 2014 (Median) to Mar 2018, with 17 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 112.000 Person in Mar 2018 and a record low of 16.000 Person in Mar 2014. Japan Info Needs Before Departure: Hong Kong: Social Network data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Japan – Table JP.Q033: Tourism and Leisure: Information Needs Before Departure.

China Daily news (15 March 2019-31 December 2019)

South China Morning Post news (15 March 2019-31 December 2019)

The Hong Kong Out-of-Home (OOH) and Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising market exhibits robust growth potential, driven by increasing urbanization, rising disposable incomes, and a surge in digital media consumption. The market's transition from traditional static OOH formats to dynamic DOOH displays is a key trend, fueled by the increasing sophistication of programmatic advertising and the ability to target specific demographics with greater precision. While traditional billboards and transit advertising remain significant segments, the adoption of LED screens and other digital technologies is rapidly expanding, enabling more interactive and data-driven campaigns. The strong presence of international and local players, such as JCDecaux SE, Hivestack, and Asiaray Media Group Limited, indicates a competitive landscape with continuous innovation in ad formats and delivery methods. Challenges include the high cost of DOOH infrastructure and maintaining impactful creative strategies within an increasingly cluttered digital environment. The market is segmented by advertising type (static and digital), application (billboards, transit, street furniture), and end-user (automotive, retail, healthcare, etc.). Considering the global CAGR of 5.63% and the vibrant advertising landscape in Hong Kong, a conservative estimate places the Hong Kong OOH and DOOH market size at approximately $100 million USD in 2025, with a projected growth rate exceeding the global average due to the region's unique characteristics. Growth in the Hong Kong OOH and DOOH market is expected to continue driven by government initiatives promoting smart city infrastructure and advancements in digital technologies. This will likely fuel investment in advanced DOOH screens and programmatic platforms. The increasing adoption of mobile technology by consumers, combined with location-based advertising capabilities, will further enhance the effectiveness of DOOH campaigns. The market will likely see increased collaboration between OOH media owners and data analytics providers to deliver more effective and measurable results for advertisers. Competition among advertising agencies and media owners will likely intensify, requiring innovation and differentiation to capture market share. Despite potential economic fluctuations, the long-term outlook for the Hong Kong OOH and DOOH market remains positive, driven by the enduring need for impactful brand building and targeted advertising solutions in a densely populated and technologically advanced city. This report provides a detailed analysis of the dynamic Hong Kong Out-of-Home (OOH) and Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising market, covering the period from 2019 to 2033. It offers invaluable insights for businesses seeking to understand the market's trends, growth potential, and key players. With a focus on market size (in millions), key segments, and competitive landscape, this report is essential for strategic decision-making in this rapidly evolving industry. The study period encompasses the historical period (2019-2024), the base year (2025), and the forecast period (2025-2033), offering a complete overview of market evolution. Recent developments include: January 2024: Bravo Media, an out-of-home media agency based in Hong Kong, is responding to the surging demand for digital formats by unveiling new digital ventures. These include digital pillar zones at MTR East Tsim Sha Tsui station and a dynamic digital impact zone at Admiralty station. This strategic move not only signifies a significant contract win for Bravo Media but also underlines its growing dominance in Hong Kong's out-of-home advertising landscape., September 2023: KFC Hong Kong partnered with Edelman Hong Kong to launch a series of engaging billboards throughout the city. The displays are designed to capture the attention of onlookers, marking the introduction of their new product, "FING FING Cajun Chips.". Key drivers for this market are: Ongoing Shift Toward Digital Advertising, Increasing Use of Recommendation Engines. Potential restraints include: Ongoing Shift Toward Digital Advertising, Increasing Use of Recommendation Engines. Notable trends are: Ongoing Shift Toward Digital Advertising Expected to Boost Market Growth.

New York Times news (15 March 2019-31 December 2019)