In 2021, there were 1.21 billion monthly active users of Meta's Instagram, making up over 28 percent of the world's internet users. By 2025, it has been forecast that there will be 1.44 billion monthly active users of the social media platform, which would account for 31.2 percent of global internet users.

How popular is Instagram?

Instagram, as of January 2022, was the fourth most popular social media platform in the world in terms of user numbers. YouTube and WhatsApp ranked in second and third place, respectively, whilst Facebook remained the most popular, with almost three billion monthly active users worldwide.

India had the largest number of Instagram users as of January 2022, with a total of over 230 million users in the country. The second-largest Instagram audience could be found in the United States, with almost 160 million people subscribing to the photo and video sharing app.

Gen Z and Instagram

As of September 2021, Gen Z users in the United States spent an average of five hours per week on Instagram. Although Instagram ranked third in terms of hours per week spent on the platform, Gen Z users spent considerably more time on TikTok, amounting to a weekly average of over 10 hours being spent on the mobile-first video app.

Most followed accounts on Instagram

As of May 2022, Instagram’s own account had 504.37 million followers. In terms of celebrities, Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (@chistiano) had over 440.41 million followers on the social network. Moreover, the average media value of an Instagram post by Ronaldo was over 985,000 U.S. dollars.

The most liked post on Instagram as of May 2022 was Photo of an Egg, which was posted in 2019 by the account @world_record_egg. Photo of an Egg has not only exceeded 55 million likes on the platform, but it also has nearly 3.5 million comments, and the account itself has over 4.5 million Instagram followers. After mysterious posts published by the account, World Record Egg revealed itself as part of a mental health campaign aimed at the difficulties and demands of using social media.

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 April 2025, almost 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 25 and 34 years, and 29.5 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 16.3 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 413.85 million and 171.7 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 first quarter of 2025, Snapchat had 460 million daily active users.

Kindly refer to my paper for more information. Please cite my work if you use my dataset in any work : K. R. Purba, D. Asirvatham and R. K. Murugesan, "Classification of instagram fake users using supervised machine learning algorithms," International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE), vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 2763-2772, 2020.

The dataset was collected using web scraping from third-party Instagram websites, to capture their metadata and up to 12 latest media posts from each user. The collection process was executed from September 1st, 2019, until September 20th, 2019. The dataset contains authentic users and fake users, which were filtered using human annotators. The authentic users were taken from followers of 24 private university pages (8 Indonesian, 8 Malaysian, 8 Australian) on Instagram. To reduce the number of users, they are picked using proportional random sampling based on their source university. All private users were removed, which is a total of 31,335 out of 63,795 users (49.11%). The final number of public users used in this research was 32,460 users.

Var name | Feature name | Description pos | Num posts | Number of total posts that the user has ever posted. flg | Num following | Number of following flr | Num followers | Number of followers bl | Biography length | Length (number of characters) of the user's biography pic | Picture availability | Value 0 if the user has no profile picture, or 1 if has lin | Link availability | Value 0 if the user has no external URL, or 1 if has cl | Average caption length | The average number of character of captions in media cz | Caption zero | Percentage (0.0 to 1.0) of captions that has almost zero (<=3) length ni | Non image percentage | Percentage (0.0 to 1.0) of non-image media. There are three types of media on an Instagram post, i.e. image, video, carousel erl | Engagement rate (Like) | Engagement rate (ER) is commonly defined as (num likes) divide by (num media) divide by (num followers) erc | Engagement rate (Comm.) | Similar to ER like, but it is for comments lt | Location tag percentage | Percentage (0.0 to 1.0) of posts tagged with location hc | Average hashtag count | Average number of hashtags used in a post pr | Promotional keywords | Average use of promotional keywords in hashtag, i.e. {regrann, contest, repost, giveaway, mention, share, give away, quiz} fo | Followers keywords | Average use of followers hunter keywords in hashtag, i.e. {follow, like, folback, follback, f4f} cs | Cosine similarity | Average cosine similarity of between all pair of two posts a user has pi | Post interval | Average interval between posts (in hours)

Output : 2-class User classes : r (real/authentic user), f (fake user / bought followers) 4-class User classes : r (authentic/real user), a (active fake user), i (inactive fake user), s (spammer fake user) Note that the 3 fake user classes (a, i, s) were judged by human annotators.

Dataset

This dataset was created by Laxman

Contents

Instagram data-download example dataset

In this repository you can find a data-set consisting of 11 personal Instagram archives, or Data-Download Packages (DDPs).

How the data was generated

These Instagram accounts were all new and generated by a group of researchers who were interested to figure out in detail
the structure and variety in structure of these Instagram DDPs. The participants user the Instagram account extensively for approximately a week. The participants also intensively communicated with each other so that the data can be used as an example of a network.

The data was primarily generated to evaluate the performance of de-identification software. Therefore, the text in the DDPs particularly contain many randomly chosen (Dutch) first names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and URLS. In addition, the images in the DDPs contain many faces and text as well. The DDPs contain faces and text (usernames) of third parties. However, only content of so-called `professional accounts' are shared, such as accounts of famous individuals or institutions who self-consciously and actively seek publicity, and these sources are easily publicly available. Furthermore, the DDPs do not contain sensitive personal data of these individuals.

Obtaining your Instagram DDP

After using the Instagram accounts intensively for approximately a week, the participants requested their personal Instagram DDPs by using the following steps. You can follow these steps yourself if you are interested in your personal Instagram DDP.

1. Go to www.instagram.com and log in
2. Click on your profile picture, go to *Settings* and *Privacy and Security*
3. Scroll to *Data download* and click *Request download*
4. Enter your email adress and click *Next*
5. Enter your password and click *Request download*

Instagram then delivered the data in a compressed zip folder with the format **username_YYYYMMDD.zip** (i.e., Instagram handle and date of download) to the participant, and the participants shared these DDPs with us.

Data cleaning

To comply with the Instagram user agreement, participants shared their full name, phone number and e-mail address. In addition, Instagram logged the i.p. addresses the participant used during their active period on Instagram. After colleting the DDPs, we manually replaced such information with random replacements such that the DDps shared here do not contain any personal data of the participants.

How this data-set can be used

This data-set was generated with the intention to evaluate the performance of the de-identification software. We invite other researchers to use this data-set for example to investigate what type of data can be found in Instagram DDPs or to investigate the structure of Instagram DDPs. The packages can also be used for example data-analyses, although no substantive research questions can be answered using this data as the data does not reflect how research subjects behave `in the wild'.

Authors

The data collection is executed by Laura Boeschoten, Ruben van den Goorbergh and Daniel Oberski of Utrecht University. For questions, please contact l.boeschoten@uu.nl.

Acknowledgments

The researchers would like to thank everyone who participated in this data-generation project.

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.

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.

Please cite this paper when using this dataset: N. Thakur, “Mpox narrative on Instagram: A labeled multilingual dataset of Instagram posts on mpox for sentiment, hate speech, and anxiety analysis,” arXiv [cs.LG], 2024, URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05292Abstract: The world is currently experiencing an outbreak of mpox, which has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by WHO. During recent virus outbreaks, social media platforms have played a crucial role in keeping the global population informed and updated regarding various aspects of the outbreaks. As a result, in the last few years, researchers from different disciplines have focused on the development of social media datasets focusing on different virus outbreaks. No prior work in this field has focused on the development of a dataset of Instagram posts about the mpox outbreak. The work presented in this paper (stated above) aims to address this research gap. It presents this multilingual dataset of 60,127 Instagram posts about mpox, published between July 23, 2022, and September 5, 2024. This dataset contains Instagram posts about mpox in 52 languages.For each of these posts, the Post ID, Post Description, Date of publication, language, and translated version of the post (translation to English was performed using the Google Translate API) are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, and anxiety or stress detection were also performed. This process included classifying each post intoone of the fine-grain sentiment classes, i.e., fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutralhate or not hateanxiety/stress detected or no anxiety/stress detected.These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset for the training and testing of machine learning algorithms for sentiment, hate speech, and anxiety or stress detection, as well as for other applications.The 52 distinct languages in which Instagram posts are present in the dataset are English, Portuguese, Indonesian, Spanish, Korean, French, Hindi, Finnish, Turkish, Italian, German, Tamil, Urdu, Thai, Arabic, Persian, Tagalog, Dutch, Catalan, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Swahili, Afrikaans, Panjabi, Gujarati, Somali, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Estonian, Swedish, Telugu, Russian, Danish, Slovak, Japanese, Kannada, Polish, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Romanian, Nepali, Czech, Modern Greek, Albanian, Croatian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Welsh, Hungarian, and Latvian.The following is a description of the attributes present in this dataset:Post ID: Unique ID of each Instagram postPost Description: Complete description of each post in the language in which it was originally publishedDate: Date of publication in MM/DD/YYYY formatLanguage: Language of the post as detected using the Google Translate APITranslated Post Description: Translated version of the post description. All posts which were not in English were translated into English using the Google Translate API. No language translation was performed for English posts.Sentiment: Results of sentiment analysis (using the preprocessed version of the translated Post Description) where each post was classified into one of the sentiment classes: fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, and neutralHate: Results of hate speech detection (using the preprocessed version of the translated Post Description) where each post was classified as hate or not hateAnxiety or Stress: Results of anxiety or stress detection (using the preprocessed version of the translated Post Description) where each post was classified as stress/anxiety detected or no stress/anxiety detected.All the Instagram posts that were collected during this data mining process to develop this dataset were publicly available on Instagram and did not require a user to log in to Instagram to view the same (at the time of writing this paper).

data Source - https://statso.io/instagram-reach-analysis-case-study/

Certainly! Let's conduct a case study on Instagram reach analysis. To make the case study more specific, let's imagine a scenario where a fashion brand called "Fashionista" wants to analyze the reach of their Instagram account over the past six months.

Objective: Analyze the reach of Fashionista's Instagram account and identify trends, patterns, and insights that can help improve their reach and engagement.

Steps for the Instagram Reach Analysis:

1. Data Collection:

   • Gather data from Fashionista's Instagram account for the past six months.
   • Collect metrics such as follower count, post reach, impressions, likes, comments, and engagement rate.
   • Use Instagram's built-in analytics or third-party tools like Iconosquare or Sprout Social to retrieve the necessary data.

2. Define Key Metrics:

   • Identify the key metrics that will help assess the reach of Fashionista's Instagram account.
   • Key metrics may include follower growth rate, average reach per post, total impressions, engagement rate, and engagement per post.

3. Analyze Follower Growth:

   • Plot the follower count over the past six months to observe any trends.
   • Calculate the follower growth rate to understand the rate at which the account is gaining or losing followers.
   • Look for any significant changes in follower count and investigate potential reasons behind those changes.

4. Evaluate Post Reach and Impressions:

   • Analyze the average reach per post and total impressions to understand the reach of Fashionista's content.
   • Identify posts with the highest and lowest reach and compare their characteristics.
   • Look for patterns or themes that resonate well with the audience and those that underperform.

5. Assess Engagement:

   • Calculate the average engagement rate and compare it across different types of content (e.g., images, videos, stories, reels).
   • Identify posts with the highest engagement rate and analyze their content, captions, and hashtags.
   • Look for patterns or elements that encourage higher engagement from the audience.

6. Identify Optimal Posting Times:

   • Analyze the data to identify the days and times when Fashionista's posts receive the highest reach and engagement.
   • Experiment with posting at different times and measure the impact on reach and engagement.

7. Monitor Competitors:

   • Analyze the reach and engagement of Fashionista's competitors' Instagram accounts.
   • Identify strategies or content types that work well for competitors and consider adopting similar approaches if relevant.

8. Generate Insights and Recommendations:

   • Summarize the findings from the analysis and identify key insights and trends.
   • Recommend strategies to improve Fashionista's Instagram reach based on the insights obtained.
   • Provide actionable recommendations such as optimizing content, using relevant hashtags, collaborating with influencers, or running Instagram ads.

By conducting a thorough analysis of Fashionista's Instagram reach, you'll gain valuable insights into their audience's behavior, content performance, and engagement patterns. These insights can help guide future content strategies and optimize reach and engagement on Instagram.

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.

This table includes platform data for Facebook participants in the Deactivation experiment. Each row of the dataset corresponds to data from a participant’s Facebook user account. Each column contains a value, or set of values, that aggregates log data for this specific participant over a certain period of time.

Please cite the following paper when using this dataset:

N. Thakur, “Five Years of COVID-19 Discourse on Instagram: A Labeled Instagram Dataset of Over Half a Million Posts for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis”, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (MLNLP 2024), Chengdu, China, October 18-20, 2024 (Paper accepted for publication, Preprint available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03293)

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 served as a catalyst for content creation and dissemination on social media platforms, as such platforms serve as virtual communities where people can connect and communicate with one another seamlessly. While there have been several works related to the mining and analysis of COVID-19-related posts on social media platforms such as Twitter (or X), YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, there is still limited research that focuses on the public discourse on Instagram in this context. Furthermore, the prior works in this field have only focused on the development and analysis of datasets of Instagram posts published during the first few months of the outbreak. The work presented in this paper aims to address this research gap and presents a novel multilingual dataset of 500,153 Instagram posts about COVID-19 published between January 2020 and September 2024. This dataset contains Instagram posts in 161 different languages. After the development of this dataset, multilingual sentiment analysis was performed using VADER and twitter-xlm-roberta-base-sentiment. This process involved classifying each post as positive, negative, or neutral. The results of sentiment analysis are presented as a separate attribute in this dataset.

For each of these posts, the Post ID, Post Description, Date of publication, language code, full version of the language, and sentiment label are presented as separate attributes in the dataset.

The Instagram posts in this dataset are present in 161 different languages out of which the top 10 languages in terms of frequency are English (343041 posts), Spanish (30220 posts), Hindi (15832 posts), Portuguese (15779 posts), Indonesian (11491 posts), Tamil (9592 posts), Arabic (9416 posts), German (7822 posts), Italian (5162 posts), Turkish (4632 posts)

There are 535,021 distinct hashtags in this dataset with the top 10 hashtags in terms of frequency being #covid19 (169865 posts), #covid (132485 posts), #coronavirus (117518 posts), #covid_19 (104069 posts), #covidtesting (95095 posts), #coronavirusupdates (75439 posts), #corona (39416 posts), #healthcare (38975 posts), #staysafe (36740 posts), #coronavirusoutbreak (34567 posts)

The following is a description of the attributes present in this dataset

• Post ID: Unique ID of each Instagram post
• Post Description: Complete description of each post in the language in which it was originally published
• Date: Date of publication in MM/DD/YYYY format
• Language code: Language code (for example: “en”) that represents the language of the post as detected using the Google Translate API
• Full Language: Full form of the language (for example: “English”) that represents the language of the post as detected using the Google Translate API
• Sentiment: Results of sentiment analysis (using the preprocessed version of each post) where each post was classified as positive, negative, or neutral

Open Research Questions

This dataset is expected to be helpful for the investigation of the following research questions and even beyond:

1. How does sentiment toward COVID-19 vary across different languages?
2. How has public sentiment toward COVID-19 evolved from 2020 to the present?
3. How do cultural differences affect social media discourse about COVID-19 across various languages?
4. How has COVID-19 impacted mental health, as reflected in social media posts across different languages?
5. How effective were public health campaigns in shifting public sentiment in different languages?
6. What patterns of vaccine hesitancy or support are present in different languages?
7. How did geopolitical events influence public sentiment about COVID-19 in multilingual social media discourse?
8. What role does social media discourse play in shaping public behavior toward COVID-19 in different linguistic communities?
9. How does the sentiment of minority or underrepresented languages compare to that of major world languages regarding COVID-19?
10. What insights can be gained by comparing the sentiment of COVID-19 posts in widely spoken languages (e.g., English, Spanish) to those in less common languages?

All the Instagram posts that were collected during this data mining process to develop this dataset were publicly available on Instagram and did not require a user to log in to Instagram to view the same (at the time of writing this paper).

The global number of Facebook users was forecast to continuously increase between 2023 and 2027 by in total 391 million users (+14.36 percent). After the fourth consecutive increasing year, the Facebook user base is estimated to reach 3.1 billion users and therefore a new peak in 2027. Notably, the number of Facebook users 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).

Die Studie über Facebook-Nutzer wurde von infratest dimap im Auftrag der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung durchgeführt. Im Erhebungszeitraum 26. November bis 4. Dezember 2018 wurden 2.041 Facebook-Nutzer in Onlineinterviews (CAWI) zu folgenden Themen befragt: Internetnutzung, Facebook-Gruppen, Facebooknutzung, politische Inhalte auf Facebook, Reaktion auf Inhalte, Bildexperiment und Sonntagsfrage. Die Auswahl der Befragten erfolgte durch eine Quotenstichprobe aus einem Online-Access-Panel. Nutzung verschiedener Internetangebote (Tinder, Facebook, Twitter, snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Online-Zeitungen, nichts davon); Nutzung offener oder geschlossener Facebook-Gruppen; Facebook-Inhalte zu politischen Themen, zu berufsbezogenen Themen, zu Hobbies, zur Unterhaltung bzw. zu anderen Themen; Art der Facebook-Nutzung (lese/ like/ teile Inhalte, schreibe Kommentare, verbreite eigene Inhalte); politische Facebook-Nutzung (lese/ like/ teile politische Inhalte, schreibe Kommentare zu politischen Themen, verbreite eigenen Inhalt zu politischen Themen); Reaktion auf Facebook- Inhalte bzw. Kommentare (fühle mich informiert, unterhalten, verärgert, provoziert); Zustimmung zu verschiedenen Aussagen zu Facebook (auf Facebook regen mich andere auf, zeige ich anderen ihre Grenzen, kann ich anonym meine Meinung sagen, finde ich viele verschiedene Meinungen, finde ich Meinungen, die sonst unterdrückt werden, traue ich mich Dinge zu sagen/ teilen, die ich sonst nicht sagen würde); Parteipräferenz (Sonntagsfrage); Kommentar (offen) zu einem provozierenden Bild (Split A: Flüchtlinge, Split B: Pegida). Demographie: Geschlecht; Alter (Geburtsjahr); Bildung; Erwerbstätigkeit; berufliche Stellung; Haushaltsnettoeinkommen (gruppiert); Bundesland. Zusätzlich verkodet wurde: lfd. Nummer; Gewichtungsfaktor. The study on Facebook users was conducted by infratest dimap on behalf of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. During the survey period from November 26 to December 4, 2018, 2,041 Facebook users were surveyed in online interviews (CAWI) on the following topics: internet use, Facebook groups, Facebook use, political content on Facebook, reaction to content, image experiment and Sunday question. Respondents were selected by quota sampling from an online access panel. Use of various internet services (Tinder, Facebook, Twitter, snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, online newspapers, none of the above); use of open or closed Facebook groups; Facebook content on political topics, on job-related topics, on hobbies, on entertainment or on other topics; type of Facebook use (read/ like/ share content, write comments, disseminate own content); political Facebook use (read/ like/ share political content, write comments on political topics, disseminate own content on political topics); reaction to Facebook content or comments (do I feel informed, entertained, annoyed, provoked, etc.). comments (feel informed, entertained, annoyed, provoked); agreement with various statements on Facebook (on Facebook others upset me, I show others their limits, I can speak my mind anonymously, I find many different opinions, I find opinions that are otherwise suppressed, I dare to say/ share things I would not otherwise say); party preference (Sunday question); comment (open) on a provocative image (split A: refugees, split B: Pegida). Demography: sex; age (year of birth); education; employment; occupational status; net household income (grouped); federal state. Additionally coded: serial number; weighting factor.

This dataset encompasses social media exposure to sponsored posts, collected from over 150,000 triple-opt-in first-party U.S. Daily Active Users (DAU). Use it for measurement, attribution or brand lift surveying. Platforms covered include Facebook, TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube.

Platform ad type coverage includes News Feed, Stories and In-Stream Videos on Facebook ; Feed and Reels on Instagram ; Feed on TikTok ; Timeline on X ; Pre-Roll on YouTube.

Instagram’s most popular post

              As of April 2024, the most popular post on Instagram was Lionel Messi and his teammates after winning the 2022 FIFA World Cup with Argentina, posted by the account @leomessi. Messi's post, which racked up over 61 million likes within a day, knocked off the reigning post, which was 'Photo of an Egg'. Originally posted in January 2021, 'Photo of an Egg' surpassed the world’s most popular Instagram post at that time, which was a photo by Kylie Jenner’s daughter totaling 18 million likes.
              After several cryptic posts published by the account, World Record Egg revealed itself to be a part of a mental health campaign aimed at the pressures of social media use.

              Instagram’s most popular accounts

              As of April 2024, the official Instagram account @instagram had the most followers of any account on the platform, with 672 million followers. Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano) was the most followed individual with 628 million followers, while Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) was the most followed woman on the platform with 429 million. Additionally, Inter Miami CF striker Lionel Messi (@leomessi) had a total of 502 million. Celebrities such as The Rock, Kylie Jenner, and Ariana Grande all had over 380 million followers each.

              Instagram influencers

              In the United States, the leading content category of Instagram influencers was lifestyle, with 15.25 percent of influencers creating lifestyle content in 2021. Music ranked in second place with 10.96 percent, followed by family with 8.24 percent. Having a large audience can be very lucrative: Instagram influencers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom with over 90,000 followers made around 1,221 US dollars per post.

              Instagram around the globe

              Instagram’s worldwide popularity continues to grow, and India is the leading country in terms of number of users, with over 362.9 million users as of January 2024. The United States had 169.65 million Instagram users and Brazil had 134.6 million users. The social media platform was also very popular in Indonesia and Turkey, with 100.9 and 57.1, respectively. As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social network in the world, behind Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp.

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.

As of April 2024, Bahrain was the country with the highest Instagram audience reach with 95.6 percent. Kazakhstan also had a high Instagram audience penetration rate, with 90.8 percent of the population using the social network. In the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Brunei, the photo-sharing platform was used by more than 85 percent of each country's population.

How much time do people spend on social media? As of 2025, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 141 minutes per day, down from 143 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 3 hours and 49 minutes on social media each day. In comparison, the daily time spent with social media in the U.S. was just 2 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.