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, Facebook 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: a little app called 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 5.42 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.

How many people use social media? Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. In 2024, over **** ******* people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to over *** 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 ** 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 *** 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.

According to a survey from June 2020, around **** percent of young people aged 17 to 19 years old in Japan were using social media. Only about six percent of Japanese in this age group had never used any of the social media platforms before.

h-hiramatsu/dataset-for-estimation-of-sns-users-place-of-residence dataset hosted on Hugging Face and contributed by the HF Datasets community

Standardized coefficients are presented (N = 78).

Correlation matrix between active and passive usage and SWB (N = 78).

SNS user behavior characteristics identified.

As of April 2024, almost 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 18 and 24 years, and 30.6 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 16 percent of users belonged to the 35 to 44 year age group.

              Instagram users

              With roughly one billion monthly active users, Instagram belongs to the most popular social networks worldwide. The social photo sharing app is especially popular in India and in the United States, which have respectively 362.9 million and 169.7 million Instagram users each.

              Instagram features

              One of the most popular features of Instagram is Stories. Users can post photos and videos to their Stories stream and the content is live for others to view for 24 hours before it disappears. In January 2019, the company reported that there were 500 million daily active Instagram Stories users. Instagram Stories directly competes with Snapchat, another photo sharing app that initially became famous due to it’s “vanishing photos” feature.
              As of the second quarter of 2021, Snapchat had 293 million daily active users.

Asterisked items were included in the final scale.

As of January 2024, Instagram was slightly more popular with men than women, with men accounting for 50.6 percent of the platform’s global users. Additionally, the social media app was most popular amongst younger audiences, with almost 32 percent of users aged between 18 and 24 years.

              Instagram’s Global Audience

              As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social media platform globally, reaching two billion monthly active users (MAU). This number is projected to keep growing with no signs of slowing down, which is not a surprise as the global online social penetration rate across all regions is constantly increasing.
              As of January 2024, the country with the largest Instagram audience was India with 362.9 million users, followed by the United States with 169.7 million users.

              Who is winning over the generations?

              Even though Instagram’s audience is almost twice the size of TikTok’s on a global scale, TikTok has shown itself to be a fierce competitor, particularly amongst younger audiences. TikTok was the most downloaded mobile app globally in 2022, generating 672 million downloads. As of 2022, Generation Z in the United States spent more time on TikTok than on Instagram monthly.

Participants’ characteristic distribution.

Interviews’ main findings with respondent statements as examples.

Social network sites (SNS) have been indispensable channels for people to access information, present themselves, and conduct commercial activities. Existing literature on online consumer behavior mainly focus on Western consumers and on explicit conspicuous signals. However, reports have shown that SNS users in China have exceeded 370 million, ranking the first in the world. Meanwhile, more and more consumers display status in more implicit ways nowadays. To fill these gaps, the present research was conducted to investigate the subtle signals of status for Chinese consumers on SNS. We proposed that frequent SNS posting leads to higher status perception among Chinese consumers. The psychological process of this effect is perceived busyness. These hypotheses received convergent support in a set of three studies. Study 1 used secondary data to preliminarily verify the positive correlation between SNS posting frequency and perceived social status. Studies 2A and 2B adopted the causal chain method to test the underlying mechanism of the effect, and to provide causal evidence for the entire relationship chain. Specifically, Study 2A examined how SNS posting frequency affects perceived busyness. Furthermore, Study 2B explored whether the differences in perceived busyness will affect social status perceptions. Implications of these findings and potential extensions in future are discussed.

The number of social media users in Japan was estimated at approximately ***** million in 2023. This figure was projected to increase to almost ***** million users by 2028. Leading social networking servicesThe most commonly used social media in Japan are the messaging app LINE, YouTube, Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), TikTok, and Facebook. LINE was developed by a Japanese subsidiary of the South Korean internet search engine provider Naver as a response to the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. While the traditional telecommunication infrastructure was damaged, people were able to connect with loved ones via social media and could stay informed about the most recent news. These possibilities generated a boost for social media in Japan, not only for LINE, but for Twitter and Facebook as well. Usage todaySocial media plays an important role today in how people in Japan communicate with each other. The average time people spend on using social media per weekday has increased significantly in recent years. According to one survey, communication with already existing acquaintances is the most common reason for using social media in Japan. Due to their nearly ubiquitous presence in the daily lives of people, social media services are also an important information tool for government institutions or companies that want to get their messages across to citizens and customers.

Participant characteristic distribution for the questionnaire.

According to a survey from June 2020, about 12 percent of young people in Japan who were aged between 17 to 19 years old have experienced online defamation on social media. The topic of online harassment and cyberbullying on social networking services (SNS) received heightened attention in Japan earlier that year due to the suicide of Hana Kimura, a female professional wrestler who also starred in a reality television series.

The files of this dataset are no longer available. A revised version has been published at: https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-235-tba9The main goal of the DFS data collection project is to map the online friendship networks of Dutch adolescents. Specifically, the Facebook networks of Dutch adolescents participating in the offline CILS4EU and CILSNL data collection are mapped. Facebook is an American social networking site (SNS) where users create an online profile, provide personal information on this profile and invite other users to become connected as friends. With these connections, users can interact via personal messaging, post directly on others’ personal profile pages and react to others’ posts. During the time of our data collection, in 2014, Facebook was the largest SNS of the world with approximately 1.3 billion members. The DFS data are collected to study the relationship between offline face-to-face contacts, and online friendship network on Facebook. To this purpose we coded variables that show respondents’ Facebook friends’ gender, numbers of friends, privacy settings and ethnicity.

Studies found and included in the mapping study.

Classification of User Behavior.

On social networking sites, people can express themselves in a variety of ways such as creating personalized profiles, commenting on some topics, sharing their experiences and thoughts. Among these technology-enabled features, retweeting other-sourced tweet is a powerful way for users to present themselves. We examine users’ retweeting behavior from the perspective of online identity and self-presentation. The empirical results based on a panel dataset crawled from Twitter reveal that, people are prone to retweet topics they are interested in and familiar with, in order to convey a consistent and clear online identity. In addition, we also examine which user groups exhibit a stronger propensity for a clear online identity, considering the practical value of these users to both social media platforms and marketers. By integrating self-presentation theory with social influence theory and social cognitive theory, we propose and confirm that users with higher value in online self-presentation efficacy and users who are more involved with the social media platform have a stronger than average propensity to maintain a consistent online identity, and thus are more likely to retweet familiar topics. These users are characterized by (1) owning a larger number of followers, (2) authoring longer and more original tweets than average, (3) being active in retweeting other-sourced posts. This study contributes to our understanding of SNS users’ retweeting behavior and adds to the emerging line of research on online identity. It also provides insights on how microblogging service providers and enterprises can promote people’s retweeting behavior.