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.

Description:

The "Daily Social Media Active Users" dataset provides a comprehensive and dynamic look into the digital presence and activity of global users across major social media platforms. The data was generated to simulate real-world usage patterns for 13 popular platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, WeChat, TikTok, Telegram, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest, Reddit, Threads, LinkedIn, and Quora. This dataset contains 10,000 rows and includes several key fields that offer insights into user demographics, engagement, and usage habits.

Dataset Breakdown:

• Platform: The name of the social media platform where the user activity is tracked. It includes globally recognized platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, that are known for their large, active user bases.

• Owner: The company or entity that owns and operates the platform. Examples include Meta for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Google for YouTube, and ByteDance for TikTok.

• Primary Usage: This category identifies the primary function of each platform. Social media platforms differ in their primary usage, whether it's for social networking, messaging, multimedia sharing, professional networking, or more.

• Country: The geographical region where the user is located. The dataset simulates global coverage, showcasing users from diverse locations and regions. It helps in understanding how user behavior varies across different countries.

• Daily Time Spent (min): This field tracks how much time a user spends on a given platform on a daily basis, expressed in minutes. Time spent data is critical for understanding user engagement levels and the popularity of specific platforms.

• Verified Account: Indicates whether the user has a verified account. This feature mimics real-world patterns where verified users (often public figures, businesses, or influencers) have enhanced status on social media platforms.

• Date Joined: The date when the user registered or started using the platform. This data simulates user account history and can provide insights into user retention trends or platform growth over time.

Context and Use Cases:

• This synthetic dataset is designed to offer a privacy-friendly alternative for analytics, research, and machine learning purposes. Given the complexities and privacy concerns around using real user data, especially in the context of social media, this dataset offers a clean and secure way to develop, test, and fine-tune applications, models, and algorithms without the risks of handling sensitive or personal information.

Researchers, data scientists, and developers can use this dataset to:

• Model User Behavior: By analyzing patterns in daily time spent, verified status, and country of origin, users can model and predict social media engagement behavior.

• Test Analytics Tools: Social media monitoring and analytics platforms can use this dataset to simulate user activity and optimize their tools for engagement tracking, reporting, and visualization.

• Train Machine Learning Algorithms: The dataset can be used to train models for various tasks like user segmentation, recommendation systems, or churn prediction based on engagement metrics.

• Create Dashboards: This dataset can serve as the foundation for creating user-friendly dashboards that visualize user trends, platform comparisons, and engagement patterns across the globe.

• Conduct Market Research: Business intelligence teams can use the data to understand how various demographics use social media, offering valuable insights into the most engaged regions, platform preferences, and usage behaviors.

• Sources of Inspiration: This dataset is inspired by public data from industry reports, such as those from Statista, DataReportal, and other market research platforms. These sources provide insights into the global user base and usage statistics of popular social media platforms. The synthetic nature of this dataset allows for the use of realistic engagement metrics without violating any privacy concerns, making it an ideal tool for educational, analytical, and research purposes.

The structure and design of the dataset are based on real-world usage patterns and aim to represent a variety of users from different backgrounds, countries, and activity levels. This diversity makes it an ideal candidate for testing data-driven solutions and exploring social media trends.

Future Considerations:

As the social media landscape continues to evolve, this dataset can be updated or extended to include new platforms, engagement metrics, or user behaviors. Future iterations may incorporate features like post frequency, follower counts, engagement rates (likes, comments, shares), or even sentiment analysis from user-generated content.

By leveraging this dataset, analysts and data scientists can create better, more effective strategies ...

How much time do people spend on social media?

              As of 2024, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 143 minutes per day, down from 151 minutes in the previous year. Currently, the country with the most time spent on social media per day is Brazil, with online users spending an average of three hours and 49 minutes on social media each day. In comparison, the daily time spent with social media in
              the U.S. was just two hours and 16 minutes. Global social media usageCurrently, the global social network penetration rate is 62.3 percent. Northern Europe had an 81.7 percent social media penetration rate, topping the ranking of global social media usage by region. Eastern and Middle Africa closed the ranking with 10.1 and 9.6 percent usage reach, respectively.
              People access social media for a variety of reasons. Users like to find funny or entertaining content and enjoy sharing photos and videos with friends, but mainly use social media to stay in touch with current events friends. Global impact of social mediaSocial media has a wide-reaching and significant impact on not only online activities but also offline behavior and life in general.
              During a global online user survey in February 2019, a significant share of respondents stated that social media had increased their access to information, ease of communication, and freedom of expression. On the flip side, respondents also felt that social media had worsened their personal privacy, increased a polarization in politics and heightened everyday distractions.

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.

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).

This dataset consists of 734 entries representing social media activity and performance from a local SME (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise) across TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter platforms. It captures key metrics related to audience interaction and content strategy effectiveness, and is valuable for evaluating and optimizing digital marketing efforts for small businesses.

Area : Target location or customer region where the UMKM's content is directed. Category : The business content category (e.g., product promotion, education, seasonal campaign). Day : The day of the week the content was published. Month : The month the post went live. Platform : The social media platform used by the UMKM (TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter). Post Type : The format of the content posted: image, video, carousel, or text. Timestamp : The exact date and time when the content was posted. User : The username or business account that posted the content. Week : Week number within the year for time-based analysis. Year : The year the content was posted. Comments : Total number of comments received on the post. Engagement Rate : A calculated metric showing how engaging the content is (based on likes, comments, shares vs. reach/impressions). Hour : Hour of the day the post was published. Impressions : Number of times the content appeared on users' feeds. Likes : Number of likes the post received. Reach : Number of unique users who saw the content. Shares : Number of times users shared the content.

1) Data Introduction • The Social Media Usage Dataset(Applications) features patterns and activity indicators that 1,000 users use seven major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

2) Data Utilization (1) Social Media Usage Dataset(Applications) has characteristics that: • This dataset provides different social media activity data for each user, including daily usage time, number of posts, number of likes received, and number of new followers. (2) Social Media Usage Dataset(Applications) can be used to: • Analysis of User Participation by Platform: You can analyze participation and popular trends by platform by comparing usage time and activity for each social media. • Establish marketing strategy: Based on user activity data, it can be used for targeted marketing, content production, and user retention strategies.

A global survey conducted in the third quarter of 2024 found that the main reason for using social media was to keep in touch with friends and family, with over 50.8 percent of social media users saying this was their main reason for using online networks. Overall, 39 percent of social media users said that filling spare time was their main reason for using social media platforms, whilst 34.5 percent of respondents said they used it to read news stories. Less than one in five users were on social platforms for the reason of following celebrities and influencers.

              The most popular social network

              Facebook dominates the social media landscape. The world's most popular social media platform turned 20 in February 2024, and it continues to lead the way in terms of user numbers. As of February 2025, the social network had over three billion global users. YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp follow, but none of these well-known brands can surpass Facebook’s audience size.
              Moreover, as of the final quarter of 2023, there were almost four billion Meta product users.

              Ever-evolving social media usage

              The utilization of social media remains largely gratuitous; however, companies have been encouraging users to become paid subscribers to reduce dependence on advertising profits. Meta Verified entices users by offering a blue verification badge and proactive account protection, among other things. X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, and Reddit also offer users the chance to upgrade their social media accounts for a monthly free.

Overview

This dataset captures the relationship between social media usage, screen-time behavior, and daily lifestyle factors such as sleep duration and interaction quality. It is useful for analyzing patterns that may influence mental well-being, digital habits, and behavioral trends among users.

The data contains individual-level entries with details like daily screen time, social media time, positive vs. negative interactions, demographic information, and sleep hours. It is ideal for:

• Exploratory data analysis
• Behavioral pattern modeling
• Correlation studies
• Prediction tasks (e.g., sleep prediction, mood trend analysis)
• Student ML/NLP/data analytics projects

Column Description:

More than 100 social media channels and statistics for the National Archives and Records Administration.

The global social media penetration rate in was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 11.6 (+18.19 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the penetration rate is estimated to reach 75.31 and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the social media penetration rate of was continuously increasing over the past years.

This dataset was originally collected for a data science and machine learning project that aimed at investigating the potential correlation between the amount of time an individual spends on social media and the impact it has on their mental health.

The project involves conducting a survey to collect data, organizing the data, and using machine learning techniques to create a predictive model that can determine whether a person should seek professional help based on their answers to the survey questions.

This project was completed as part of a Statistics course at a university, and the team is currently in the process of writing a report and completing a paper that summarizes and discusses the findings in relation to other research on the topic.

The following is the Google Colab link to the project, done on Jupyter Notebook -

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1p7P6lL1QUw1TtyUD1odNR4M6TVJK7IYN

The following is the GitHub Repository of the project -

https://github.com/daerkns/social-media-and-mental-health

Libraries used for the Project -

Pandas
Numpy
Matplotlib
Seaborn
Sci-kit Learn

A curated dataset of 2025 social media statistics including global user identities, adoption rates, daily time spent, reasons for use, platforms per month, and platform ad reach.

During a January 2024 global survey among marketers, nearly 60 percent reported plans to increase their organic use of YouTube for marketing purposes in the following 12 months. LinkedIn and Instagram followed, respectively mentioned by 57 and 56 percent of the respondents intending to use them more. According to the same survey, Facebook was the most important social media platform for marketers worldwide.

Social Media has become a part of our day-to-day routine, keeping users from across the world well-connected through digital platforms. With each passing year, social media is evolving at a rapid speed. With each passing year, the number of social media users is increasing at an immersive speed. Reports also suggest the number of social media users will reach a milestone of 5.85 billion in 2027.

In 2024, 62.6% of the world’s population will access social media, which clearly indicates the dominance of social media platforms in today’s world. In this article, we will examine social media statistics for 2024, uncovering monthly active users, daily time spent by users, most downloaded social media apps, etc.

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.

This dataset contains simulated data for social media users' demographics, behaviors, and perceptions related to political content. It includes features such as age, gender, education level, occupation, social media usage frequency, exposure to political content, and perceptions of accuracy and relevance.

the features included in the "Social Media Political Content Analysis Dataset":

1. Age: Age of the user.
2. Gender: Gender identity of the user.
3. Education Level: Highest level of education attained by the user.
4. Occupation: Current occupation of the user.
5. Political Affiliation: Political leaning or affiliation of the user (e.g., Liberal, Conservative, Independent).
6. Geographic Location: Country or region where the user is located (e.g., USA, UK, Canada, Australia).
7. Social Media Usage Frequency: Frequency of social media usage by the user (e.g., 0-1 hour, 1-2 hours, 2-4 hours, 4+ hours).
8. Preferred Social Media: Social media platform preferred by the user (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).
9. Political Content Exposure: Frequency of exposure to political content on social media (e.g., Once a day, Few times a week, Rarely, Several times a day).
10. Types of Political Content: Types of political content consumed by the user (e.g., News articles, Opinion pieces, Memes).
11. Sources of Political Content: Sources from which the user obtains political content (e.g., Mainstream media, Political parties, Independent bloggers).
12. Recency of Exposure: Recency of the user's exposure to political content (e.g., Within the last hour, Within the last 24 hours, Within the last week, Longer than a week ago).
13. Interactions Frequency: Frequency of user interactions with political content on social media (e.g., Once a day, Few times a week, Rarely, Several times a day).
14. Political Content Topics: Topics of political content that interest the user (e.g., Economy, Healthcare, Immigration, Environment).
15. Perception of Accuracy: User's perception of the accuracy of political content on social media (e.g., Very accurate, Somewhat accurate, Not accurate).
16. Awareness of Algorithms: Whether the user is aware of algorithms that determine their social media feed (e.g., Yes, No).
17. Perception of Relevance: User's perception of the relevance of political content on social media (e.g., Very relevant, Somewhat relevant, Not relevant).
18. Personal Impact: User's perception of the personal impact of political content on social media (e.g., Strong impact, Moderate impact, No impact).
19. Trust in Social Media: User's level of trust in social media as a source of political information (e.g., Trust a lot, Trust somewhat, Do not trust).
20. Concerns about Algorithms: User's level of concern about algorithms shaping their social media experience (e.g., Very concerned, Somewhat concerned, Not concerned).
21. Overall Quality of Discourse: User's perception of the overall quality of political discourse on social media (e.g., High quality, Moderate quality, Low quality).
22. Views on Influence: User's perception of the influence of political content on social media (e.g., Very influential, Somewhat influential, Not influential).
23. Suggestions for Improvement: User's suggestions for improving the quality or experience of political content on social media (e.g., Increase transparency, Provide more diverse sources, Improve fact-checking, Enhance user controls).

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.

This dataset provides a comprehensive analysis of the factors influencing the credibility of information on social media among Iranian users. The research focuses on identifying the most significant factors that affect the perceived credibility of information shared on various social media platforms. The dataset includes demographic information, social media usage patterns, and ratings of various attributes related to information credibility.

Key Features

• Demographic Data: Includes age, gender, education level, study field, and university.
• Social Media Usage: Details on the number of social media memberships, active platforms, and average hours spent per day.
• Credibility Factors: Ratings on various attributes such as source trustworthiness, media structure, message accuracy, and more.
• Comprehensive Coverage: Covers multiple dimensions of social media usage and information credibility.
• User-Centric Insights: Provides insights into how users perceive and interact with information on social media.

Potential Uses

• Academic Research: Investigate the factors that influence information credibility on social media.
• Social Media Analysis: Understand user behavior and preferences on social media platforms.
• Policy Development: Inform policies related to information dissemination and credibility on social media.
• Marketing and Advertising: Tailor content strategies based on user perceptions of credibility.
• User Experience Design: Improve the design and functionality of social media platforms to enhance information credibility.

Version 25 of the dataset, we have refactored the full_dataset.tsv and full_dataset_clean.tsv files (since version 20) to include two additional columns: language and place country code (when available). This change now includes language and country code for ALL the tweets in the dataset, not only clean tweets. With this change we have removed the clean_place_country.tar.gz and clean_languages.tar.gz files. With our refactoring of the dataset generating code we also found a small bug that made some of the retweets not be counted properly, hence the extra increase on tweets available.

Due to the relevance of the COVID-19 global pandemic, we are releasing our dataset of tweets acquired from the Twitter Stream related to COVID-19 chatter. Since our first release we have received additional data from our new collaborators, allowing this resource to grow to its current size. Dedicated data gathering started from March 11th yielding over 4 million tweets a day. We have added additional data provided by our new collaborators from January 27th to March 27th, to provide extra longitudinal coverage. Version 10 added ~1.5 million tweets in the Russian language collected between January 1st and May 8th, gracefully provided to us by: Katya Artemova (NRU HSE) and Elena Tutubalina (KFU). From version 12 we have included daily hashtags, mentions and emoijis and their frequencies the respective zip files. From version 14 we have included the tweet identifiers and their respective language for the clean version of the dataset. Since version 20 we have included language and place location for all tweets.

The data collected from the stream captures all languages, but the higher prevalence are: English, Spanish, and French. We release all tweets and retweets on the full_dataset.tsv file (651,611,876 unique tweets), and a cleaned version with no retweets on the full_dataset-clean.tsv file (154,646,580 unique tweets). There are several practical reasons for us to leave the retweets, tracing important tweets and their dissemination is one of them. For NLP tasks we provide the top 1000 frequent terms in frequent_terms.csv, the top 1000 bigrams in frequent_bigrams.csv, and the top 1000 trigrams in frequent_trigrams.csv. Some general statistics per day are included for both datasets in the full_dataset-statistics.tsv and full_dataset-clean-statistics.tsv files. For more statistics and some visualizations visit: http://www.panacealab.org/covid19/

More details can be found (and will be updated faster at: https://github.com/thepanacealab/covid19_twitter) and our pre-print about the dataset (https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.03688)

As always, the tweets distributed here are only tweet identifiers (with date and time added) due to the terms and conditions of Twitter to re-distribute Twitter data ONLY for research purposes. They need to be hydrated to be used.