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 LinkedIn users in the United Kingdom was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 1.5 million users (+4.51 percent). After the eighth consecutive increasing year, the LinkedIn user base is estimated to reach 34.7 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. User figures, shown here with regards to the platform LinkedIn, 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).

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

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

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 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.

In this post, I'll give you all the social media addiction statistics you need to be aware of to moderate your social media use.

Indicators from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN) related to people’s social media use and attitudes towards elections in Great Britain.

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 is a dataset of tweets by and about COVID-aware publics from the 'X' (Twitter) social media platform collected by the author. The dataset consists of 344 textual tweets regarding COVID-related material practices gathered during the research period Jan 2023 - Sep 2024, yet the dataset also includes tweets created before this date.The textual data has been rewritten to fully anonymise the people who made the tweets, and identifiable contexts have been removed. In addition, all date/time metadata and hashtags, as well as any attached images, have been removed. Square brackets have been used for editorial edits to obfuscate entities or add context to tweets. The dataset consists of a structured comma-separated text file that can be read in any spreadsheet software to maximise accessibility.The research dataset was created with Open university HREC approval: HREC/4557/Nold

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

The number of Pinterest users in the United Kingdom was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 0.3 million users (+3.14 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Pinterest user base is estimated to reach 9.88 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Pinterest users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here regarding the platform pinterest, 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).

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.

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

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

Data for a Brief Report/Short Communication published in Body Image (2021). Details of the study are included below via the abstract from the manuscript. The dataset includes online experimental data from 167 women who were recruited via social media and institutional participant pools. The experiment was completed in Qualtrics.Women viewed either neutral travel images (control), body positivity posts with an average-sized model (e.g., ~ UK size 14), or body positivity posts with a larger model (e.g., UK size 18+); which images women viewed is show in the ‘condition’ variable in the data.The data includes the age range, height, weight, calculated BMI, and Instagram use of participants. After viewing the images, women responded to the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), a state version of the Body Satisfaction Scale (BSS), and reported their immediate social comparison with the images (SAC items). Women then selected a lunch for themselves from a hypothetical menu; these selections are detailed in the data, as are the total calories calculated from this and the proportion of their picks which were (provided as a percentage, and as a categorical variable [as used in the paper analyses]). Women also reported whether they were on a special diet (e.g., vegan or vegetarian), had food intolerances, when they last ate, and how hungry they were.

Women also completed trait measures of Body Appreciation (BAS-2) and social comparison (PACS-R). Women also were asked to comment on what they thought the experiment was about. Items and computed scales are included within the dataset.This item includes the dataset collected for the manuscript (in SPSS and CSV formats), the variable list for the CSV file (for users working with the CSV datafile; the variable list and details are contained within the .sav file for the SPSS version), and the SPSS syntax for our analyses (.sps). Also included are the information and consent form (collected via Qualtrics) and the questions as completed by participants (both in pdf format).Please note that the survey order in the PDF is not the same as in the datafiles; users should utilise the variable list (either in CSV or SPSS formats) to identify the items in the data.The SPSS syntax can be used to replicate the analyses reported in the Results section of the paper. Annotations within the syntax file guide the user through these.

A copy of SPSS Statistics is needed to open the .sav and .sps files.

Manuscript abstract:

Body Positivity (or ‘BoPo’) social media content may be beneficial for women’s mood and body image, but concerns have been raised that it may reduce motivation for healthy behaviours. This study examines differences in women’s mood, body satisfaction, and hypothetical food choices after viewing BoPo posts (featuring average or larger women) or a neutral travel control. Women (N = 167, 81.8% aged 18-29) were randomly assigned in an online experiment to one of three conditions (BoPo-average, BoPo-larger, or Travel/Control) and viewed three Instagram posts for two minutes, before reporting their mood and body satisfaction, and selecting a meal from a hypothetical menu. Women who viewed the BoPo posts featuring average-size women reported more positive mood than the control group; women who viewed posts featuring larger women did not. There were no effects of condition on negative mood or body satisfaction. Women did not make less healthy food choices than the control in either BoPo condition; women who viewed the BoPo images of larger women showed a stronger association between hunger and calories selected. These findings suggest that concerns over BoPo promoting unhealthy behaviours may be misplaced, but further research is needed regarding women’s responses to different body sizes.

United Kingdom E Commerce: Social Networks: 10-49 Employees data was reported at 57.900 % in 2016. This records an increase from the previous number of 53.900 % for 2015. United Kingdom E Commerce: Social Networks: 10-49 Employees data is updated yearly, averaging 48.500 % from Dec 2012 (Median) to 2016, with 5 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 57.900 % in 2016 and a record low of 38.200 % in 2012. United Kingdom E Commerce: Social Networks: 10-49 Employees data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Office for National Statistics. The data is categorized under Global Database’s UK – Table UK.S039: E Commerce: Proportion of Businesses Using Social Media: By Size of Business.