Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently sits at more than three billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns four of the biggest social media platforms, all with more than one billion monthly active users each: Facebook (core platform), WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. In the third quarter of 2023, Facebook reported around four billion monthly core Family product users. The United States and China account for the most high-profile social platforms Most top-ranked social networks with more than 100 million users originated in the United States, but services like Chinese social networks WeChat, QQ, or video-sharing app Douyin have also garnered mainstream appeal in their respective regions due to local context and content. Douyin’s popularity has led to the platform releasing an international version of its network, TikTok. How many people use social media? The leading social networks are usually available in multiple languages and enable users to connect with friends or people across geographical, political, or economic borders. In 2025, social networking sites are estimated to reach 5.44 billion users, and these figures are still expected to grow as mobile device usage and mobile social networks increasingly gain traction in previously underserved markets.

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.

Despite a tumultuous 2018, Facebook is still the top social network in the United States, with 169.76 million mobile users accessing the Facebook app in September 2019. The company’s other properties Instagram and Facebook Messenger ranked second and third with 121 and 106 million users respectively. Cambridge Analytica scandal 2018 The biggest social media company in the world had a difficult 2018. The platform has long been accused of enabling the spread of fake news during the 2016 election and beyond. One of the first and biggest negative Facebook stories of 2018 was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which unfolded from March 2018. The Guardian, The Observer, and The New York Times simultaneously reported on political data firm Cambridge Analytica harvesting data of millions of Facebook users worldwide without their knowledge before the 2016 election, which led to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg having to testify before Congress in April 2018. Facebook usage behavior changes Due to the revelations about Facebook and the company’s treatment of private user data, many U.S. users are planning to use the social network much less and to be much more careful about what they post . During an April 2018 survey, only 20 percent of respondents stated that their Facebook usage has not changed, and they were planning on continuing to use the social platform as much as they always had in the past.

Over the five years through 2025-26, industry revenue is forecast to expand at a compound annual rate of 20.3% to reach £12.5 billion. Social media platforms are integral to people's lives, offering ways to communicate, create and view content and share information. According to Ofcom, approximately 89% of UK internet users in 2023 used social media apps or sites. Teenagers and young adults are the biggest users. Advertising is the primary revenue source for social media platforms, although subscription-based services are gaining momentum as platforms seek to diversify their incomes. TikTok is the success story of the past five years, becoming the most downloaded app between 2020 and 2022, according to Apptopia. The short-form video platform has over 30 million monthly users in the UK in 2025. After Musk's takeover, X, formerly known as Twitter, adjusted its content moderation and allowed previously banned accounts to return. As a result, over 600 advertisers pulled their ads from the site because of fears their brand may be associated with malcontent. In response to falling ad revenue, X has introduced a subscription-based service which enables users to verify themselves and boosts the number of people who view their tweets. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram have responded by introducing a similar service. In 2025, more social media platforms are using AI to boost user engagement. This improves click-through rates and drives higher advertising revenue. Industry revenue is expected to grow by 6.3% in 2025-26. Over the five years through 2030-31, social media platforms' revenue is projected to climb at an estimated 9.2% to reach £19.4 billion. Regulations relating to how data is collected, stored, and shared will force advertisers and platforms to rethink how they can target their desired demographics. The tightening of regulations will raise industry compliance costs, weighing on profit margin. Older age groups present a new revenue opportunity for social media platforms if they can bridge the gap between passive TV consumption and interactive digital engagement. Augmented Reality (AR) technology will move beyond filters to become standard for immersive product trials, interactive ads, and virtual meetups

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 ...

A list of the most popular (top 100 by followers) Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok users. NB! For YouTube the followers are subscribers and the posts are videos.

In March 2025, ******** accounted for ** percent of all social media site visits in the United States, confirming its position as the leading social media website by far. Other social media platforms, despite their popularity, had to make do with smaller shares of visits across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices combined. ********* ranked second with ***** percent of all U.S. social media site visits, while X (previously Twitter) accounted for ***** percent of the total visits in the country. Additionally, the U.S. is home to the third largest social media audience worldwide. Facebook: mobile vs desktop usage At the beginning of 2022, around ** percent of Facebook users across the globe were using the platform’s social networking services exclusively via mobile phone, while only *** percent reported using their desktop or laptop devices. In September 2022, three Facebook Inc. products occupied some of the leading positions as most downloaded social networking apps on the Apple App Store in the United States. WhatsApp’s messaging platform ranked second with more than *** million downloads, while Facebook and the instant-messaging service Messenger followed ranking third and fifth with *** million and **** million downloads respectively. Social media evolution Between 2012 and 2024, the daily time spent on social networks worldwide experienced an almost constant increase, with users reaching an average of *** minutes per day in 2023, with a decrease to *** daily minutes of engagement in 2024. However, users’ favorite platforms have changed since 2019, and the power balance appears to be shifting further from Facebook’s market dominance. Not only Facebook’s user growth rate is estimated to slow down in the next years, but users belonging to Generation Z appear to prefer video-first social platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

In 2025, Meta's Facebook held approximately ***** percent of the social network market in the United Kingdom, while X (formerly Twitter) accounted for approximately ******percent. Overall, Instagram held *****percent of the social network market in the UK.

List of Top Institutions of Online Social Networks and Media sorted by citations.

Epinions social network

Dataset information

This is who-trust-whom online social network of a a general consumer review
site Epinions.com. Members of the site can decide whether to ''trust'' each
other. All the trust relationships interact and form the Web of Trust which is then combined with review ratings to determine which reviews are shown to the user.

Dataset statistics

Nodes 131828
Edges 841372
Nodes in largest WCC 119130 (0.904)
Edges in largest WCC 833695 (0.991)
Nodes in largest SCC 41441 (0.314)
Edges in largest SCC 693737 (0.825)
Average clustering coefficient 0.2424
Number of triangles 4910076
Fraction of closed triangles 0.08085
Diameter (longest shortest path) 14
90-percentile effective diameter 4.9

Source (citation)

J. Leskovec, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg: Signed Networks in Social Media.
28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2010.
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/triads-chi10.pdf

Files
File Description
soc-sign-epinions.txt.gz Directed Epinions signed social network

Slashdot signed social network, November 2008

Dataset information

Slashdot is a technology-related news website know for its specific user
community. The website features user-submitted and editor-evaluated current
primarily technology oriented news. In 2002 Slashdot introduced the Slashdot
Zoo feature which allows users to tag each other as friends or foes. The
network cotains friend/foe links between the users of Slashdot. The network was obtained in November 2008.

Dataset statistics
Nodes 77357
Edges 516575
Nodes in largest WCC 77350 (1.000)
Edges in largest WCC 516575 (1.000)
Nodes in largest SCC 26996 (0.349)
Edges in largest SCC 337351 (0.653)
Average clustering coefficient 0.0820
Number of triangles 548054
Fraction of closed triangles 0.02407
Diameter (longest shortest path) 10
90-percentile effective diameter 4.7

Source (citation)

J. Leskovec, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg: Signed Networks in Social Media.
28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2010.
...

Facebook was the social network with the largest market share in Sweden as of March 2025. The market share of Facebook made up more than 86 percent of the total market in Sweden. Instagram reached 6.81 percent, ranking second. Overall, Pinterest had roughly 2.44 percent of all Swedish social network views. Social media usage in Sweden Overall, the share of Swedes participating in social networks grew between 2011 and 2023. 54 percent of interviewed individuals used social media in 2011, whereas in 2023 this increased to 73.24 percent. The Nordics and social media Compared to the other Nordic countries, Sweden ranked third in share of active social media users in 2024. Around 80.1 percent of the country's population were active users, while Finland's active social media users accounted for 80.4 percent. Norway had the highest share with 81.7 percent. The Faroe Islands ranked sixth with 66.7 percent. The number of active social media users amounted to 8.53 million in Sweden in 2024.

This statistic presents the social network membership reach among the online population in the United States. During the February 2017 survey, 27 percent of U.S. internet users accessed the social image sharing platform Pinterest. Facebook was ranked first with a 78 percent usage rate.

How many people use social media? Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. In 2025, over *** billion people were estimated to be using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to over *** billion in 2030. 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 ** percent. This figure is anticipated to grow as less 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. The mobile-first market of 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 *** minutes per day on social media and messaging apps, an increase of ** 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 *** billion registered accounts and currently boasts approximately *** 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.

******** was the social network with the largest market share in Denmark as of March 2025, amounting to over ** percent. Overall, Pinterest and Instagram accounted for **** percent and **** percent of the market share, respectively. X/Twitter amassed **** percent of the social media market share in Denmark in March 2024. How old are most social media users? According to a survey of social media users, the majority of respondents were of ages between ** and **. Around ** percent of respondents in this age group used social networks in 2020. Furthermore, those aged between 60 and 74 used online platforms the least, as only ** percent of respondents in this age group reported engaging with social networks. The Nordics and social media The number of social media users was the highest in Sweden, among the other Nordic countries. Over *** million Swedish respondents were using social media in 2021. Denmark had over *** million social media users, while Norway and Finland had **** and **** million users, respectively.

As of February 2021, YouTube had a global penetration rate of 62 percent, followed closely by Meta's Facebook, with 61 percent. Overall, instant messaging service WhatsApp had a global penetration rate of 52 percent. Additionally, 12 percent of people used TikTok, and one in ten people around the world use messaging service Telegram.

According to data from February 2025, Facebook was the most popular social network for news access in the United Kingdom, with ** percent of respondents using the service. YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) ranked second and third, with ** and ** percent of users respectively using the networks for news content.

In November 2025, Meta's Facebook held over 80 percent of the social media market in Europe, while Instagram accounted for 5.8 percent of website visits in Europe. X (formerly Twitter) made up 4.58 percent of website visits, and Pinterest accounted for 4.22 percent.

Facebook remained the largest market share among social media platforms across India, at roughly ** percent as of August 2025. The Meta-owned social network site has consistently led the country's social media market since 2019. However, Instagram, the second leading social media platform has been increasingly gaining market share and closing the gap with its sister company. Commercial social media usage in India Apart from creating user-generated content, Indians have leveraged social media to grow their businesses. As consumption via online channels increased, social media began playing an important role in stimulating the Indian economy. Among the most popularly used social media platforms in India, Facebook was increasingly used for digital marketing. On the other hand, Instagram emerged as the country’s leading platform for influencer collaboration. Meta Platforms Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has quickly gone on to become the social media giant it is today. Having acquired leading social media platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, the company rebranded itself as Meta Platforms Inc. in 2021. The following year, Meta generated a revenue of nearly *** billion U.S. dollars. The company has further set its sights on bringing the metaverse to life to enhance the online experience of over ***** billion Facebook users across the world.

According to a survey on digital usage in China, around 91.8 percent of respondents had used WeChat as of the third quarter of 2023. The short video app Douyin, the social commerce site Xiaohongshu, and the Twitter-like site Weibo, were among the most popular social media platforms in China. How successful is WeChat in China? The country’s most popular messaging app, WeChat, boasts over one billion monthly active users. For many Chinese consumers, WeChat is part of daily life, helping them to organize tasks such as paying bills, ordering food delivery, and calling a taxi. On average, WeChat users spent about an hour and 20 minutes per day on the app. Large user base with high engagement The social media scene in China is huge and mobile-centric. In 2023, the social media penetration rate amounted to 74 percent in China, slightly higher than in countries like the United States and Japan. While the user number has shown signs of reaching a saturation point, Chinese consumers have been spending more time online, with a considerable daily usage of social media.

As of the third quarter of 2024, WhatsApp was the most active social network among internet users in the United Kingdom (UK), with 79.9 percent of internet users reporting use of the service. Facebook was very close behind, with a rate of 72.3 percent, followed by Facebook Messenger with 56.6 percent. YouTube’s broad audience in the United Kingdom YouTube reaches a broad audience in the UK, making it an attractive partner for advertisers of almost any product. More than 75 percent of individuals of every income bracket watch YouTube, with the likelihood of watching increasing with the pay-grade. Whether advertising basic items or luxury products, marketers should be able to connect with UK audiences through YouTube. There are almost no people in the UK to not use YouTube at least monthly. According to a survey conducted in the third quarter of 2020, 46 percent of respondents went on YouTube on a daily basis. Facebook in the United Kingdom  Facebook enjoys a healthy market position in the UK, holding an estimated  55 percent share of the market. The service attracted  50.6 million UK users during May 2021, and Facebook UK Limited  generated 1.1 billion British pounds in revenue  during 2019. The UK division of the company  posted an operating profit of 121.9 million British pounds that year.