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.

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).

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.

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.

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 dataset contains 31 transcribed and anonymized interviews of blockchain-based social media users. The dataset was collected during the summer of 2022 as part of a research project at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. The dataset is available upon request for validation by peer-reviewers or other researchers in the field.

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

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.

Context: This dataset offers insights into the usage patterns of social media apps for 1,000 users across seven popular platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It tracks various metrics such as daily time spent on the app, number of posts made, likes received, and new followers gained.

Dataset Features:

User_ID: Unique identifier for each user. App: The social media platform being used. Daily_Minutes_Spent: Total time a user spends on the app each day, ranging from 5 to 500 minutes. Posts_Per_Day: Number of posts a user creates per day, ranging from 0 to 20. Likes_Per_Day: Total number of likes a user receives on their posts each day, ranging from 0 to 200. Follows_Per_Day: The number of new followers a user gains daily, ranging from 0 to 50. Context & Use Cases: This dataset could be particularly useful for social media analysts, digital marketers, or researchers interested in understanding user engagement trends across different platforms. It provides insights into how much time users spend, how actively they post, and the level of engagement they receive (in terms of likes and followers).

Conclusion & Outcome: Analyzing this dataset could yield several outcomes:

Engagement Patterns: Identifying which platforms have higher engagement in terms of time spent or likes received. Active Users: Determining which users are the most active across various platforms based on the number of posts and followers gained. User Retention: Studying the correlation between time spent and follower growth, providing insight into user retention strategies for different platforms. Overall, the dataset allows for exploration of social media usage trends and helps drive decision-making for marketing strategies, content creation, and platform engagement.

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

This data set belongs to:Beyens, I., Pouwels, J. L., van Driel, I. I., Keijsers, L., & Valkenburg, P. M. (2020). The effect of social media on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent. Scientific Reports. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-67727-7The design, sampling and analysis plan of the study are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/nhks2.For more information, please contact the authors at i.beyens@uva.nl or info@project-awesome.nl.

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

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.

MultiSocial is a dataset (described in a paper) for multilingual (22 languages) machine-generated text detection benchmark in social-media domain (5 platforms). It contains 472,097 texts, of which about 58k are human-written and approximately the same amount is generated by each of 7 multilingual large language models by using 3 iterations of paraphrasing. The dataset has been anonymized to minimize amount of sensitive data by hiding email addresses, usernames, and phone numbers.

If you use this dataset in any publication, project, tool or in any other form, please, cite the paper.

Disclaimer

Due to data source (described below), the dataset may contain harmful, disinformation, or offensive content. Based on a multilingual toxicity detector, about 8% of the text samples are probably toxic (from 5% in WhatsApp to 10% in Twitter). Although we have used data sources of older date (lower probability to include machine-generated texts), the labeling (of human-written text) might not be 100% accurate. The anonymization procedure might not successfully hiden all the sensitive/personal content; thus, use the data cautiously (if feeling affected by such content, report the found issues in this regard to dpo[at]kinit.sk). The intended use if for non-commercial research purpose only.

Data Source

The human-written part consists of a pseudo-randomly selected subset of social media posts from 6 publicly available datasets:

1. Telegram data originated in Pushshift Telegram, containing 317M messages (Baumgartner et al., 2020). It contains messages from 27k+ channels. The collection started with a set of right-wing extremist and cryptocurrency channels (about 300 in total) and was expanded based on occurrence of forwarded messages from other channels. In the end, it thus contains a wide variety of topics and societal movements reflecting the data collection time.

2. Twitter data originated in CLEF2022-CheckThat! Task 1, containing 34k tweets on COVID-19 and politics (Nakov et al., 2022, combined with Sentiment140, containing 1.6M tweets on various topics (Go et al., 2009).

3. Gab data originated in the dataset containing 22M posts from Gab social network. The authors of the dataset (Zannettou et al., 2018) found out that “Gab is predominantly used for the dissemination and discussion of news and world events, and that it attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls.” They also found out that hate speech is much more prevalent there compared to Twitter, but lower than 4chan's Politically Incorrect board.

4. Discord data originated in Discord-Data, containing 51M messages. This is a long-context, anonymized, clean, multi-turn and single-turn conversational dataset based on Discord data scraped from a large variety of servers, big and small. According to the dataset authors, it contains around 0.1% of potentially toxic comments (based on the applied heuristic/classifier).

5. WhatsApp data originated in whatsapp-public-groups, containing 300k messages (Garimella & Tyson, 2018). The public dataset contains the anonymised data, collected for around 5 months from around 178 groups. Original messages were made available to us on request to dataset authors for research purposes.

From these datasets, we have pseudo-randomly sampled up to 1300 texts (up to 300 for test split and the remaining up to 1000 for train split if available) for each of the selected 22 languages (using a combination of automated approaches to detect the language) and platform. This process resulted in 61,592 human-written texts, which were further filtered out based on occurrence of some characters or their length, resulting in about 58k human-written texts.

The machine-generated part contains texts generated by 7 LLMs (Aya-101, Gemini-1.0-pro, GPT-3.5-Turbo-0125, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2, opt-iml-max-30b, v5-Eagle-7B-HF, vicuna-13b). All these models were self-hosted except for GPT and Gemini, where we used the publicly available APIs. We generated the texts using 3 paraphrases of the original human-written data and then preprocessed the generated texts (filtered out cases when the generation obviously failed).

The dataset has the following fields:

• 'text' - a text sample,

• 'label' - 0 for human-written text, 1 for machine-generated text,

• 'multi_label' - a string representing a large language model that generated the text or the string "human" representing a human-written text,

• 'split' - a string identifying train or test split of the dataset for the purpose of training and evaluation respectively,

• 'language' - the ISO 639-1 language code identifying the detected language of the given text,

• 'length' - word count of the given text,

• 'source' - a string identifying the source dataset / platform of the given text,

• 'potential_noise' - 0 for text without identified noise, 1 for text with potential noise.

ToDo Statistics (under construction)

Youtube social network and ground-truth communities Dataset information Youtube is a video-sharing web site that includes a social network. In the Youtube social network, users form friendship each other and users can create groups which other users can join. We consider such user-defined groups as ground-truth communities. This data is provided by Alan Mislove et al.

We regard each connected component in a group as a separate ground-truth community. We remove the ground-truth communities which have less than 3 nodes. We also provide the top 5,000 communities with highest quality which are described in our paper. As for the network, we provide the largest connected component.

more info : https://snap.stanford.edu/data/com-Youtube.html

This database is comprised of 951 participants who provided self-report data online in their school classrooms. The data was collected in 2016 and 2017. The dataset is comprised of 509 males (54%) and 442 females (46%). Their ages ranged from 12 to 16 years (M = 13.69, SD = 0.72). Seven participants did not report their age. The majority were born in Australia (N = 849, 89%). The next most common countries of birth were China (N = 24, 2.5%), the UK (N = 23, 2.4%), and the USA (N = 9, 0.9%). Data were drawn from students at five Australian independent secondary schools. The data contains item responses for the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS; Spence, 1998) which is comprised of 44 items. The Social media question asked about frequency of use with the question “How often do you use social media?”. The response options ranged from constantly to once a week or less. Items measuring Fear of Missing Out were included and incorporated the following five questions based on the APS Stress and Wellbeing in Australia Survey (APS, 2015). These were “When I have a good time it is important for me to share the details online; I am afraid that I will miss out on something if I don’t stay connected to my online social networks; I feel worried and uncomfortable when I can’t access my social media accounts; I find it difficult to relax or sleep after spending time on social networking sites; I feel my brain burnout with the constant connectivity of social media. Internal consistency for this measure was α = .81. Self compassion was measured using the 12-item short-form of the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS-SF; Raes et al., 2011). The data set has the option of downloading an excel file (composed of two worksheet tabs) or CSV files 1) Data and 2) Variable labels. References: Australian Psychological Society. (2015). Stress and wellbeing in Australia survey. https://www.headsup.org.au/docs/default-source/default-document-library/stress-and-wellbeing-in-australia-report.pdf?sfvrsn=7f08274d_4 Raes, F., Pommier, E., Neff, K. D., & Van Gucht, D. (2011). Construction and factorial validation of a short form of the self-compassion scale. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 18(3), 250-255. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.702 Spence, S. H. (1998). A measure of anxiety symptoms among children. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36(5), 545-566. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(98)00034-5

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

Social Media and Online Usage to Improve the Customer Experience (description updated 3/10/2023)

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.