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.
https://brightdata.com/licensehttps://brightdata.com/license
Access detailed insights with our Instagram datasets, featuring follower counts, verified status, account types, and engagement scores. Explore post information including URLs, descriptions, hashtags, comments, likes, media, posting dates, locations, and reel URLs. Perfect for understanding user engagement and content trends to drive informed decisions and optimize your social media strategies. Over 750M records available Price starts at $250/100K records Data formats are available in JSON, NDJSON, CSV, XLSX and Parquet. 100% ethical and compliant data collection Included datapoints:
Account Fbid Id Followers Posts Count Is Business Account Is Professional Account Is Verified Avg Engagement External Url Biography Business Category Name Category Name Post Hashtags Following Posts Profile Image Link Profile URL Profile Name Highlights Count Highlights Full Name Is Private Bio Hashtags URL Is Joined Recently And much more
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.
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Instagram[a] is a photo and video sharing social networking service founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and later acquired by American company Facebook Inc. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tag and location, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed.
Instagram was originally distinguished by allowing content to be framed only in a square (1:1) aspect ratio of 640 pixels to match the display width of the iPhone at the time. In 2015, this restrictions was eased with an increase to 1080 pixels. It also added messaging features, the ability to include multiple images or videos in a single post, and a Stories feature—similar to its main competitor Snapchat—which allowed users to post their content to a sequential feed, with each post accessible to others for 24 hours. As of January 2019, Stories is used by 500 million people daily.
This dataset comprises of the details of top 1000 influencers in instagram
Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
License information was derived automatically
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.
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.
https://brightdata.com/licensehttps://brightdata.com/license
Gain valuable insights with our comprehensive Social Media Dataset, designed to help businesses, marketers, and analysts track trends, monitor engagement, and optimize strategies. This dataset provides structured and reliable social media data from multiple platforms.
Dataset Features
User Profiles: Access public social media profiles, including usernames, bios, follower counts, engagement metrics, and more. Ideal for audience analysis, influencer marketing, and competitive research. Posts & Content: Extract posts, captions, hashtags, media (images/videos), timestamps, and engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. Useful for trend analysis, sentiment tracking, and content strategy optimization. Comments & Interactions: Analyze user interactions, including replies, mentions, and discussions. This data helps brands understand audience sentiment and engagement patterns. Hashtag & Trend Tracking: Monitor trending hashtags, topics, and viral content across platforms to stay ahead of industry trends and consumer interests.
Customizable Subsets for Specific Needs Our Social Media Dataset is fully customizable, allowing you to filter data based on platform, region, keywords, engagement levels, or specific user profiles. Whether you need a broad dataset for market research or a focused subset for brand monitoring, we tailor the dataset to your needs.
Popular Use Cases
Brand Monitoring & Reputation Management: Track brand mentions, customer feedback, and sentiment analysis to manage online reputation effectively. Influencer Marketing & Audience Analysis: Identify key influencers, analyze engagement metrics, and optimize influencer partnerships. Competitive Intelligence: Monitor competitor activity, content performance, and audience engagement to refine marketing strategies. Market Research & Consumer Insights: Analyze social media trends, customer preferences, and emerging topics to inform business decisions. AI & Predictive Analytics: Leverage structured social media data for AI-driven trend forecasting, sentiment analysis, and automated content recommendations.
Whether you're tracking brand sentiment, analyzing audience engagement, or monitoring industry trends, our Social Media Dataset provides the structured data you need. Get started today and customize your dataset to fit your business objectives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Automatically describing images using natural sentences is an essential task for visually impaired people's inclusion on the Internet. Although there are many datasets in the literature, most of them contain only English captions, whereas datasets with captions described in other languages are scarce.
PraCegoVer arose on the Internet, stimulating users from social media to publish images, tag #PraCegoVer, and add a short description of their content. Inspired by this movement, we have proposed the #PraCegoVer, a multi-modal dataset with Portuguese captions based on posts from Instagram. It is the first large dataset for image captioning in Portuguese with freely annotated images.
#PraCegoVer has 533,523 pairs with images and captions described in Portuguese collected from more than 14 thousand different profiles. Also, the average caption length in #PraCegoVer is 39.3 words and the standard deviation is 29.7.
New Release
We release pracegover_400k.json which contains 403,337 examples from the original dataset.json after preprocessing and duplication removal. It is split into train, validation, and test with 242036, 80628, and 80673 examples, respectively.
Dataset Structure
#PraCegoVer dataset comprehends a main file dataset.json and a collection of compressed files named images.tar.gz.partX
containing the images. The file dataset.json comprehends a list of JSON objects with the attributes:
Each instance in dataset.json is associated with exactly one image in the images directory whose filename is pointed by the attribute filename. Also, we provide a sample with five instances, so the users can download the sample to get an overview of the dataset before downloading it completely.
Download Instructions
If you just want to have an overview of the dataset structure, you can download sample.tar.gz. But, if you want to use the dataset, or any of its subsets (63k, 173k, and 400k), you must download all the files and run the following commands to uncompress and join the files:
cat images.tar.gz.part* > images.tar.gz
tar -xzvf images.tar.gz
Alternatively, you can download the entire dataset from the terminal using the python script download_dataset.py available in the PraCegoVer repository. In this case, first, you have to download the script and create an access token here. Then, you can run the following command to download and uncompress the image files:
python download_dataset.py --access_token=
The number of Instagram users in the United Kingdom was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 2.1 million users (+7.02 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Instagram user base is estimated to reach 32 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Instagram users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here with regards to the platform instagram, 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).
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.
Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
License information was derived automatically
Name: LGBTQIAphobia_dataset_augmented_balanced
Description: Labeled dataset with phrases retrieved from different digital sources (X/twitter, Instagram, TikTok) containing diverse messages directed towards the LGBTQIA+ community. It has 1000 phrases classified as {Non-LGBTQIAphobic (0), LGBTQIAphobic (1)} . It is the balanced version of LGBTQIAphobia_dataset_augmented.
Language: Spanish
Format: CSV (UTF-8)
Structure: id; phrase; class {0,1}
Purpose: Be used for fine-tuned models that detect language offensive to Spanish or Latin LGBT communities in digital environments.
Sources: X/Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube comments
Size: 20Kb
Ethical considerations: This dataset was created strictly for academic and research purposes. We oppose any type of digital violence, in this case, against the LGBTQIA+ community. The person who was the target of the hate speech has been anonymised, and there is no intention to harm them in any way, either them or the person who delivered the speech. We prioritise the protection of the privacy and confidentiality of vulnerable individuals. To safeguard privacy, we carefully remove any identifying details, such as user IDs, phone numbers, and addresses, before sharing the data with our annotators. All the data we collect is from publicly available sources and does not contain any personal or sensitive information that may jeopardise anyone’s privacy. I request researchers to commit to abiding by ethical guidelines so as not to unnecessarily harm individuals.
¿How was it created?
- Starting recovery of discriminatory phrases for the LGBTQIA+ community from X/Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok (197 phrases).
- Labelling by 3 raters as non-LGBTphobic (0) and LGBTphobic (1).
- Text augmentation was applied through backtranslation and random synonym replacement.
- Translating to Spanish part of McGiff, J., & Nikolov, N. S. (2024) dataset and was added under licence CC-BY-4.0
- To balance the majority class, we applied the undersampling technique.
- Finally, we obtained 1000 tagged phrases for version 1.0.2 of LGBTQIAphobia_augmented_balanced
Class distribution
class |
instances |
0 |
513 |
1 |
487 |
where class is
0: non-lgbtphobic
1: lgbtphobic
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.
The number of Instagram users in Central & Western Europe was forecast to increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 4.5 million users (+3.52 percent). This overall increase does not happen continuously, notably not in 2028. The Instagram user base is estimated to amount to 132.21 million users in 2028. Notably, the number of Instagram users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here with regards to the platform instagram, 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).Find more key insights for the number of Instagram users in countries like Eastern Europe and Northern Europe.
The number of Instagram users in Indonesia was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 5.3 million users (+4.25 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Instagram user base is estimated to reach 129.83 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Instagram users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here with regards to the platform instagram, 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).Find more key insights for the number of Instagram users in countries like Philippines and Thailand.
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.
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.
The number of Twitter users in the United States was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 4.3 million users (+5.32 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Twitter user base is estimated to reach 85.08 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Twitter users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here regarding the platform twitter, 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.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).Find more key insights for the number of Twitter users in countries like Canada and Mexico.
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.