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.

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 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.

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.

Social media companies are starting to offer users the option to subscribe to their platforms in exchange for monthly fees. Until recently, social media has been predominantly free to use, with tech companies relying on advertising as their main revenue generator. However, advertising revenues have been dropping following the COVID-induced boom. As of July 2023, Meta Verified is the most costly of the subscription services, setting users back almost 15 U.S. dollars per month on iOS or Android. Twitter Blue costs between eight and 11 U.S. dollars per month and ensures users will receive the blue check mark, and have the ability to edit tweets and have NFT profile pictures. Snapchat+, drawing in four million users as of the second quarter of 2023, boasts a Story re-watch function, custom app icons, and a Snapchat+ badge.

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)

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.

During a 2024 survey among marketers worldwide, around 86 percent reported using Facebook for marketing purposes. Instagram and LinkedIn followed, respectively mentioned by 79 and 65 percent of the respondents.

              The global social media marketing segment

              According to the same study, 59 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 2024. 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.

Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share: All Platforms: Youku data was reported at 0.040 % in 02 May 2024. This records an increase from the previous number of 0.010 % for 01 May 2024. Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share: All Platforms: Youku data is updated daily, averaging 0.000 % from Jan 2024 (Median) to 02 May 2024, with 111 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 0.200 % in 26 Mar 2024 and a record low of 0.000 % in 30 Apr 2024. Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share: All Platforms: Youku data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Statcounter Global Stats. The data is categorized under Global Database’s India – Table IN.SC.IU: Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share.

trends

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.

The report provides a snapshot of the social media usage trends amongst online Canadian adults based on an online survey of 1500 participants. Canada continues to be one of the most connected countries in the world. An overwhelming majority of online Canadian adults (94%) have an account on at least one social media platform. However, the 2022 survey results show that the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in some changes in how and where Canadians are spending their time on social media. Dominant platforms such as Facebook, messaging apps and YouTube are still on top but are losing ground to newer platforms such as TikTok and more niche platforms such as Reddit and Twitch.

Pinning down the role of social ties in the decision to protest has been notoriously elusive, largely due to data limitations. Social media and their global use by protesters offer an unprecedented opportunity to observe real-time social ties and online behavior, though often without an attendant measure of real-world behavior. We collect data on Twitter activity during the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protest in Paris which, unusually, record real-world protest attendance and network structure measured beyond egocentric networks. We devise a test of social theories of protest that hold that participation depends on exposure to others’ intentions and network position determines exposure. Our findings are strongly consistent with these theories, showing that protesters are significantly more connected to one another via direct, indirect, triadic, and reciprocated ties than comparable non-protesters. These results offer the first large-scale empirical support for the claim that social network structure has consequences for protest participation. The data were collected by the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory (https://wp.nyu.edu/smapp/), of which Nagler and Tucker are co-Directors along with Richard Bonneau and John T. Jost. The SMaPP lab is supported by the INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation (Award SES-1248077), the New York University Global Institute for Advanced Study, the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, and Dean Thomas Carew’s Research Investment Fund at New York University. In order to run the replication end-to-end, we recommend downloading the comprehensive archive (charlie-hebdo-replication.tar.gz). The archive contains all the files with the appropriate directory structure. Once the archive is expanded, the full replication pipeline may be executed by running the script run-all.sh in the scripts directory.

Malaysia Internet Usage: Social Media/Online Community data was reported at 89.300 % in 2016. This records an increase from the previous number of 80.000 % for 2015. Malaysia Internet Usage: Social Media/Online Community data is updated yearly, averaging 87.100 % from Dec 2014 (Median) to 2016, with 3 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 89.300 % in 2016 and a record low of 80.000 % in 2015. Malaysia Internet Usage: Social Media/Online Community data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Malaysia – Table MY.TB003: Telecommunication Statistics: Internet.

Sustainability Social Media Posts Dataset

Description

This synthetic dataset contains 1,000+ social media posts related to sustainability and climate action across multiple platforms. The data captures engagement metrics, user information, content themes, and calls to action from climate and environmental advocacy posts spanning from August 2024 to August 2025.

Dataset Columns

Key Statistics

• Total Posts: 13,144 entries
• Date Range: August 2024 - August 2025
• Platforms: 7 different social media platforms
• Geographic Coverage: Global locations including major cities across continents
• Topic Categories: 50+ distinct climate and sustainability topics
• Sentiment Distribution: Mix of positive, negative, and neutral posts

Pakistan Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share: Desktop: Fark data was reported at 0.000 % in 23 Apr 2025. This stayed constant from the previous number of 0.000 % for 22 Apr 2025. Pakistan Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share: Desktop: Fark data is updated daily, averaging 0.000 % from Apr 2024 (Median) to 23 Apr 2025, with 89 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 0.200 % in 22 Sep 2024 and a record low of 0.000 % in 23 Apr 2025. Pakistan Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share: Desktop: Fark data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Statcounter Global Stats. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Pakistan – Table PK.SC.IU: Internet Usage: Social Media Market Share.

The Reddit Subreddit Dataset by Dataplex offers a comprehensive and detailed view of Reddit’s vast ecosystem, now enhanced with appended AI-generated columns that provide additional insights and categorization. This dataset includes data from over 2.1 million subreddits, making it an invaluable resource for a wide range of analytical applications, from social media analysis to market research.

Dataset Overview:

This dataset includes detailed information on subreddit activities, user interactions, post frequency, comment data, and more. The inclusion of AI-generated columns adds an extra layer of analysis, offering sentiment analysis, topic categorization, and predictive insights that help users better understand the dynamics of each subreddit.

2.1 Million Subreddits with Enhanced AI Insights: The dataset covers over 2.1 million subreddits and now includes AI-enhanced columns that provide: - Sentiment Analysis: AI-driven sentiment scores for posts and comments, allowing users to gauge community mood and reactions. - Topic Categorization: Automated categorization of subreddit content into relevant topics, making it easier to filter and analyze specific types of discussions. - Predictive Insights: AI models that predict trends, content virality, and user engagement, helping users anticipate future developments within subreddits.

Sourced Directly from Reddit:

All social media data in this dataset is sourced directly from Reddit, ensuring accuracy and authenticity. The dataset is updated regularly, reflecting the latest trends and user interactions on the platform. This ensures that users have access to the most current and relevant data for their analyses.

Key Features:

• Subreddit Metrics: Detailed data on subreddit activity, including the number of posts, comments, votes, and user participation.
• User Engagement: Insights into how users interact with content, including comment threads, upvotes/downvotes, and participation rates.
• Trending Topics: Track emerging trends and viral content across the platform, helping you stay ahead of the curve in understanding social media dynamics.
• AI-Enhanced Analysis: Utilize AI-generated columns for sentiment analysis, topic categorization, and predictive insights, providing a deeper understanding of the data.

Use Cases:

• Social Media Analysis: Researchers and analysts can use this dataset to study online behavior, track the spread of information, and understand how content resonates with different audiences.
• Market Research: Marketers can leverage the dataset to identify target audiences, understand consumer preferences, and tailor campaigns to specific communities.
• Content Strategy: Content creators and strategists can use insights from the dataset to craft content that aligns with trending topics and user interests, maximizing engagement.
• Academic Research: Academics can explore the dynamics of online communities, studying everything from the spread of misinformation to the formation of online subcultures.

Data Quality and Reliability:

The Reddit Subreddit Dataset emphasizes data quality and reliability. Each record is carefully compiled from Reddit’s vast database, ensuring that the information is both accurate and up-to-date. The AI-generated columns further enhance the dataset's value, providing automated insights that help users quickly identify key trends and sentiments.

Integration and Usability:

The dataset is provided in a format that is compatible with most data analysis tools and platforms, making it easy to integrate into existing workflows. Users can quickly import, analyze, and utilize the data for various applications, from market research to academic studies.

User-Friendly Structure and Metadata:

The data is organized for easy navigation and analysis, with metadata files included to help users identify relevant subreddits and data points. The AI-enhanced columns are clearly labeled and structured, allowing users to efficiently incorporate these insights into their analyses.

Ideal For:

• Data Analysts: Conduct in-depth analyses of subreddit trends, user engagement, and content virality. The dataset’s extensive coverage and AI-enhanced insights make it an invaluable tool for data-driven research.
• Marketers: Use the dataset to better understand your target audience, tailor campaigns to specific interests, and track the effectiveness of marketing efforts across Reddit.
• Researchers: Explore the social dynamics of online communities, analyze the spread of ideas and information, and study the impact of digital media on public discourse, all while leveraging AI-generated insights.

This dataset is an essential resource for anyone looking to understand the intricacies of Reddit's vast ecosystem, offering the data and AI-enhanced insights needed to drive informed decisions and strategies across various fields. Whether you’re tracking emerging trends, analyzing user behavior, or conduc...