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 ...

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 provides detailed rankings and key metrics for 100+ social media platforms and sites in 2025. It includes information such as user base, popularity trends, and global reach. Ideal for analyzing social media growth, user engagement, and market trends. Whether you're a data scientist, marketer, or researcher, this dataset offers valuable insights into the evolving digital landscape.

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.

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.

This dataset contains 600 synthetic entries simulating social media activity across three major platforms: Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram. The data was generated to analyze trends, sentiments, and user engagement patterns based on hashtags and posts. It can be useful for researchers, data analysts, and machine learning enthusiasts interested in studying social media behavior.

Dataset Structure The dataset includes the following columns:

Date: The date of the post, ranging across a simulated timeline. Platform: The social media platform where the post was made (Twitter, Reddit, or Instagram). Hashtag: The main hashtag associated with the post, such as #AI, #MachineLearning, or #Python. Post Content: The text of the post, crafted to simulate common social media interactions. Sentiment: The sentiment of the post, classified as Positive, Neutral, or Negative. Likes: The number of likes the post received. Shares: The number of shares or retweets the post received. Potential Use Cases Sentiment analysis: Train machine learning models to detect sentiment in text. Hashtag popularity analysis: Determine which hashtags are most commonly used or generate the most engagement. Engagement trends: Explore correlations between post sentiment and engagement metrics (likes/shares). Platform comparison: Compare user behavior across different social media platforms. Acknowledgments This dataset is fully synthetic and was generated using Python. It does not contain any real user data and is intended for educational and research purposes.

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.

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.

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.

This dataset contains survey responses about social media usage patterns and their perceived effects on relationships and mental health. The data was collected from individuals primarily in the 18-25 age group.

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}

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.

This dataset is structured as a graph, where nodes represent users and edges capture their interactions, including tweets, retweets, replies, and mentions. Each node provides detailed user attributes, such as unique ID, follower and following counts, and verification status, offering insights into each user's identity, role, and influence in the mental health discourse. The edges illustrate user interactions, highlighting engagement patterns and types of content that drive responses, such as tweet impressions. This interconnected structure enables sentiment analysis and public reaction studies, allowing researchers to explore engagement trends and identify the mental health topics that resonate most with users.

The dataset consists of three files: 1. Edges Data: Contains graph data essential for social network analysis, including fields for UserID (Source), UserID (Destination), Post/Tweet ID, and Date of Relationship. This file enables analysis of user connections without including tweet content, maintaining compliance with Twitter/X’s data-sharing policies. 2. Nodes Data: Offers user-specific details relevant to network analysis, including UserID, Account Creation Date, Follower and Following counts, Verified Status, and Date Joined Twitter. This file allows researchers to examine user behavior (e.g., identifying influential users or spam-like accounts) without direct reference to tweet content. 3. Twitter/X Content Data: This file contains only the raw tweet text as a single-column dataset, without associated user identifiers or metadata. By isolating the text, we ensure alignment with anonymization standards observed in similar published datasets, safeguarding user privacy in compliance with Twitter/X's data guidelines. This content is crucial for addressing the research focus on mental health discourse in social media. (References to prior Data in Brief publications involving Twitter/X data informed the dataset's structure.)

This dataset focuses on analyzing user engagement trends across major social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. It includes data related to likes, Comments, Shares and other metrics that indicate how users interact with content online.

The goal of this dataset is to explore patterns in social media behavior, understand content performance, and support research in digital marketing, user behavior analytics, and social media strategy.

This dataset was created as part of an academic project and includes:

• Engagement metrics (likes, Shares, Comments)

• Time-based trends

• User categories (influencers, brands, regular users)

• Platform-specific observations (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook)

All data is either simulated or compiled from publicly available sources and does not include any personal or sensitive user information.

The data from my thesis. This data was collected using the Lifeguide Software and exported onto SPSS following data collection. The data was collected from young people aged 11-18 years old to explore the impact of different types of social media use.

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.

This study investigates the possible relationship of the students’ extent of exposure to social networking sites, their extent of use of the social networking services and the extent of use of the writing strategies in weblogging on their writing performance. The study’s sample contained 65 fourth year level students for school year 2010 – 2011 from Philippine Southfield School.

The cross-lingual natural disaster dataset includes public tweets collected using Twitter’s public API, filtering by location-related keywords and date, without using any additional filtering (e.g., we did not restrict the query to specific languages). We considered two disaster events and two long-term natural disasters across Europe (floods and wildfires) that received substantial news coverage internationally.

Three of the top languages were common to all the studied events: English (ISO 639-1 code: en), Spanish (es), and French (fr). Additionally, we found hundreds of messages for each event in other five languages, including Arabic (ar), German (de), Japanese (ja), Indonesian (id), Italian (it) and Portuguese (pt).

After collecting the data, we labelled tweets that contained potentially informative factual information. We name this group of tweets “informative messages.” Next, we used crowdsourcing to further categorize the messages into various informational categories. We asked three different workers to label each informative messages across languages. The target categories were based on an ontology from TREC-IS 2018, where we grouped some low level ontology categories into higher-level ones.

Forecast: Internet Users Using the Internet for Accessing Social Networking Sites in the Last 3 Months by Business Type in Czech Republic 2022 - 2026 Discover more data with ReportLinker!