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.

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.

Facebook is fast approaching 3 billion monthly active users. That’s about 36% of the world’s entire population that log in and use Facebook at least once a month.

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).

Facebook received 73,390 user data requests from federal agencies and courts in the United States during the second half of 2023. The social network produced some user data in 88.84 percent of requests from U.S. federal authorities. The United States accounts for the largest share of Facebook user data requests worldwide.

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

During a 2024 survey, 77 percent of respondents from Nigeria stated that they used social media as a source of news. In comparison, just 23 percent of Japanese respondents said the same. Large portions of social media users around the world admit that they do not trust social platforms either as media sources or as a way to get news, and yet they continue to access such networks on a daily basis.

              Social media: trust and consumption

              Despite the majority of adults surveyed in each country reporting that they used social networks to keep up to date with news and current affairs, a 2018 study showed that social media is the least trusted news source in the world. Less than 35 percent of adults in Europe considered social networks to be trustworthy in this respect, yet more than 50 percent of adults in Portugal, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia said that they got their news on social media.

              What is clear is that we live in an era where social media is such an enormous part of daily life that consumers will still use it in spite of their doubts or reservations. Concerns about fake news and propaganda on social media have not stopped billions of users accessing their favorite networks on a daily basis.
              Most Millennials in the United States use social media for news every day, and younger consumers in European countries are much more likely to use social networks for national political news than their older peers.
              Like it or not, reading news on social is fast becoming the norm for younger generations, and this form of news consumption will likely increase further regardless of whether consumers fully trust their chosen network or not.

📊 Social Media vs Productivity — Realistic Behavioral Dataset (30,000 Users)

This dataset explores how daily digital habits — including social media usage, screen time, and notification exposure — relate to individual productivity, stress, and well-being.

🔍 What’s Inside?

The dataset contains 30,000 real-world-style records simulating behavioral patterns of people with various jobs, social habits, and lifestyle choices. The goal is to understand how different digital behaviors correlate with perceived and actual productivity.

🧠 Why This Dataset is Valuable

• ✅ Designed for real-world ML workflows
  Includes missing values, noise, and outliers — ideal for practicing data cleaning and preprocessing.

• 🔗 High correlation between target features
  The perceived_productivity_score and actual_productivity_score are strongly correlated, making this dataset suitable for experiments in feature selection and multicollinearity.

• 🛠️ Feature Engineering playground
  Use this dataset to practice feature scaling, encoding, binning, interaction terms, and more.

• 🧪 Perfect for EDA, regression & classification
  You can model productivity, stress, or satisfaction based on behavior patterns and digital exposure.

🧾 Columns & Feature Info

📌 Notes

• Contains NaN values in critical columns (productivity, sleep, stress) for data imputation tasks
• Includes outliers in media usage, coffee intake, and notification count
• Target columns are strongly correlated for multicollinearity testing
• Multi-purpose: regression, classification, clustering, visualization

💡 Use Cases

• Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
• Feature engineering pipelines
• Machine learning model benchmarking
• Statistical hypothesis testing
• Burnout and mental health prediction projects

📥 Bonus

👉 Sample notebook coming soon with data cleaning, visualization, and productivity prediction!

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.

The results might surprise you when looking at internet users that are active on social media in each country.

Context

Social Media has been taking up everything on the Internet. People getting the latest news, useful resources, life partner and what not. In a world where Social media plays a big role in giving news, we must also know that news which affects our sentiments are going to get spread like a wildfire. Based on the Headline and the title, and according to the date given and the Social media platforms, you have to predict how it has affected the human sentiment scores. You have to predict the column “SentimentTitle” and “SentimentHeadline”.

Content

This is a subset of the dataset of the same name available in the UCI Machine Learning Repository The collected data relates to a period of 8 months, between November 2015 and July 2016, accounting for about 100,000 news items on four different topics: economy, microsoft, obama and palestine.

Dataset Information

The attributes for each of the dataset are : - IDLink (numeric): Unique identifier of news items - Title (string): Title of the news item according to the official media sources - Headline (string): Headline of the news item according to the official media sources - Source (string): Original news outlet that published the news item - Topic (string): Query topic used to obtain the items in the official media sources - Publish-Date (timestamp): Date and time of the news items' publication - Facebook (numeric): Final value of the news items' popularity according to the social media source Facebook - Google-Plus (numeric): Final value of the news items' popularity according to the social media source Google+ - LinkedIn (numeric): Final value of the news items' popularity according to the social media source LinkedIn - SentimentTitle: Sentiment score of the title, Higher the score, better is the impact or +ve sentiment and vice-versa. (Target Variable 1) - SentimentHeadline: Sentiment score of the text in the news items' headline. Higher the score, better is the impact or +ve sentiment. (Target Variable 2)

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.

Context

With roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2021, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide. In the third quarter of 2012, the number of active Facebook users surpassed one billion, making it the first social network ever to do so. Active users are those who have logged into Facebook during the past 30 days. During the first quarter of 2021, the company stated that 3.51 billion people were using at least one of the company's core products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger) each month.

Content

This data was collected by Facebook and was released in July 2021.

The average person has 8-9 social media accounts. This has doubled since 2013, when the average person just had 4-5 accounts.

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.

Emo Visual Data

Introduction

This is an emoticon visual annotation data set, which collects 5329 emoticons and uses the glm-4v api and step-free-api projects to complete the visual annotation through multi-modal large models.

Example:

0f20b31d-e019-4565-9286-fdf29cc8e144.jpg

Original 这个表情包中的内容和笑点在于它展示了一只卡通兔子，兔子的表情看起来既无奈又有些生气，配文是“活着已经够累了，上网你还要刁难我”。这句话以一种幽默的方式表达了许多人在上网时可能会遇到的挫折感或烦恼，尤其是当遇到困难或不顺心的事情时。这种对现代生活压力的轻松吐槽使得这个表情包在社交媒体上很受欢迎，人们用它来表达自己在网络世界中的疲惫感或面对困难时的幽默态度。

Translated: The content and laughter of this emoticon package is that it shows a cartoon rabbit. The rabbit's expression looks helpless and a little angry. The caption is "I am tired of living, but you still make things difficult for me online." This quote expresses in a humorous way the frustration or annoyance that many people may experience when surfing the Internet, especially when something difficult or doesn't go their way. This lighthearted take on the pressures of modern life has made the meme popular on social media, where people use it to express their feelings of exhaustion in the online world or to use humor in the face of difficulties.

During a 2025 survey among marketers worldwide, around 83 percent reported using Facebook for marketing purposes. Instagram and LinkedIn followed, respectively mentioned by 78 and 69 percent of the respondents. The global social media marketing segment According to the same study, 60 percent of responding marketers intended to increase their organic use of YouTube for marketing purposes throughout that year. LinkedIn and Instagram followed with similar shares, rounding up the top three social media platforms attracting a planned growth in organic use among global marketers in 2025. Their main driver is increasing brand exposure and traffic, which led the ranking of benefits of social media marketing worldwide. Social media for B2B marketing Social media platform adoption rates among business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketers vary according to each subsegment's focus. While B2C professionals prioritize Facebook and Instagram, both run by Meta, Inc., due to their popularity among online audiences, B2B marketers concentrate their endeavors on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn due to its goal to connect people and companies in a corporate context.

Interactions on social media have the potential to help us to understand human behaviour, including the development of both good and poor mental health. However, to do the best science we need to know as much as possible about the people who are participating in our research. The CLOSER group of UK longitudinal cohorts include people who have contributed their data to research since birth. By inviting participants in these cohorts to also allow us to derive information from their social media feeds, we will be able to relate this information to gold-standard measures of the behaviours we are trying to understand and to world-class data on other aspects of life. To work out the best way to do this, our project will engage with participants in the Children of the '90s cohort to find out what is acceptable to them in terms of collecting and using their interactions on social media. We will use what we have learnt to develop software that collects and codes social media data in a way that protects the anonymity of participants by scoring Tweets without making the text available to researchers. We will share this software with other CLOSER cohorts to make it easy for them to invite participants to contribute their Twitter data in a safe and secure way. The high-resolution data collected in this way will help us to understand human behaviour and how mental health changes over time. Collecting these data in well known groups of people will also give scientists the information they need to improve the quality of all research using social media.Interactions on social media have the potential to help us to understand human behaviour, including the development of both good and poor mental health. However, to do the best science we need to know as much as possible about the people who are participating in our research. The CLOSER group of UK longitudinal cohorts include people who have contributed their data to research since birth. By inviting participants in these cohorts to also allow us to derive information from their social media feeds, we will be able to relate this information to gold-standard measures of the behaviours we are trying to understand and to world-class data on other aspects of life. To work out the best way to do this, our project will engage with participants in the Children of the '90s cohort to find out what is acceptable to them in terms of collecting and using their interactions on social media. We will use what we have learnt to develop software that collects and codes social media data in a way that protects the anonymity of participants by scoring Tweets without making the text available to researchers. We will share this software with other CLOSER cohorts to make it easy for them to invite participants to contribute their Twitter data in a safe and secure way. The high-resolution data collected in this way will help us to understand human behaviour and how mental health changes over time. Collecting these data in well known groups of people will also give scientists the information they need to improve the quality of all research using social media. We are demonstrating collection, anonymisation and analysis of social media data from consenting participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Initially we are studying Twitter use, and gathering data through the platforms API. Our software gathers social media posts and interactions from participants every few days, with datasets being stored under security ISO 27001 certification. Derived, depersonalised datasets can be made available to approved researchers, and we aim to provide a means to evaluate sentiment analysis methods against ground truth data.

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

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