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 2029. 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.

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.

Between October 2020 and March 2021, users aged between 40 and 44 years were the demographic spending the largest amount of time engaging with social media apps, with an average of 59.85 minutes per day. Global users aged 19 or younger spent the least amount of time on social media apps, while users aged 50 years or older spent approximately 56.43 minutes per day on social media apps.

As of April 2025, almost 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 25 and 34 years, and 29.5 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 16.3 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 413.85 million and 171.7 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 first quarter of 2025, Snapchat had 460 million daily active users.

A survey conducted in the Netherlands in 2022 found that the average daily time spent on social media was *** minutes, up from ** minutes in 2021, and ** minutes in 2020. Overall, social media users aged 15 to 19 years spent the most time on online platforms, totaling *** minutes per day in 2022. The largest increase in time spent on social media occurred in the ** to ** -ear age group. In 2021, this age group spent *** minutes on social media per day, increasing to *** minutes in 2022.

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.

According to a telephone interview conducted in the United States in February 2021, 49 percent of respondents who used Facebook visited the social media platform several times per day, whilst 22 percent of users visited the site about once a day. Of those who used Snapchat, 45 percent of them used the mobile app several times a day. Regarding Twitter, 30 percent of respondents visited the online social networking service several times a day, whilst 53 percent reported to access it less frequently, meaning they used it a few times a week or every few weeks.

How many people are on social media? Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities and in 2021, ** percent of the population in the United States had a social networking profile, representing a *** percent increase from the ** percent usage reach in the previous year. This equals approximately 223 million U.S. social media users as of 2020. Global social media accessAccording to estimates, the number of worldwide social media users reached *** billion in January 2021. The overall most popular social network based on active users is the American market leader Facebook. In January 2021, Facebook had some **** billion accounts, followed by YouTube and WhatsApp with roughly *** billion and *** billion users respectively. The regions with the highest penetration of social media users are Western and Northern Europe. Social media audiences in the United StatesAlthough knowing how many people use social media is a powerful indicator of the tremendous influence such websites and apps have in our day to day life, how people are using them and who these users are is also telling. A report on social media usage released in 2019 shows that among Americans, younger online audiences were more likely to use social networks than older generations. Social media users in the United States use different social networks for a wide range of purposes. In a February 2019 survey, Instagram was the top social network for viewing photos whereas Facebook was more popular for sharing content.

Between October 2020 and March 2021, female users spent approximately 62.59 minutes per day using social media apps on their smartphones and mobile devices. By comparison, male users spent approximately 49.53 minutes on social media apps daily.

According to a global survey conducted in 2021, respondents who belonged to Generation Z reported spending on average three hours per day on social media. Overall, Millennials stated that they spent 2.25 hours per day on online social platforms. Those belonging to the Baby boomer generation spent an average one hour on social media, daily.

The average time spent on social media by young people aged between 16 and 25 seemed quite important in France in 2021. According to the survey, carried out in January 2021, more than half of the 4,682 respondents said they spent less than two hours a day on social media. About 40 percent reckoned spending between three and five hours on these networks, and 14 percent dedicated more than five hours to their online social media activity.

The number of hours spent on social media in Sweden has fluctuated over the past few years. Swedish users spent around two hours and one minute every day on social media as of February 2025, a marginal increase from the previous year. In 2021, an average of one hour and 48 minutes were spent on social networks per day, rising to over two hours in 2022.

Over nine million people used WhatsApp every day in the Netherlands in 2021, an increase of roughly 500,000 daily users from previous years. This DAU metric was much less for Instagram and YouTube, reaching 3.7 million and 3.1 million daily active users respectively. When it comes to overall user numbers for social media in the Netherlands, WhatsApp and Facebook both had over ten million users in 2019.

How much time does a Dutch person spend on social media?

Dutch Internet users spent on average 84 minutes a day browsing social media sites via any device in 2020, a number that was significantly lower when compared to other European countries. According to a 2020 survey, more than half of the interviewed social media users said they spent less than one hour online on Facebook.

Which social media platform do Dutch Millennials use the most?

Millennials, ages 23 to 37, prefer to use WhatsApp. Facebook was also popular, with 82 percent of the respondents to a 2020 survey saying they use the social network. The same survey mentions that 23-to-37-year-olds are also part of the user base of Instagram and Snapchat in the Netherlands. However, a 2021 report shows that Instagram was much more popular among Millenials than it was among the Generation Z.

In 2021, U.S. Congress members generated a total of ***** Twitter posts per day and *** Facebook posts. In addition, there were *** press releases per day and ** daily posts on YouTube. Across all platforms there was a slight decrease daily in posts when compared to 2020, apart from YouTube, which saw a slight increase.

Social media has become a part of the daily life in China. According to a survey conducted in *********, texting and watching livestreams were the most popular function among mobile social media users in China, with **** percent and **** percent of respondents saying they had used the functions respectively.

I’ve compiled a list of the latest social media user statistics showing just how big social media has become and where it’s likely to go in the future.

As of February 2025, 5.56 billion individuals worldwide were internet users, which amounted to 67.9 percent of the global population. Of this total, 5.24 billion, or 63.9 percent of the world's population, were social media users. Global internet usage Connecting billions of people worldwide, the internet is a core pillar of the modern information society. Northern Europe ranked first among worldwide regions by the share of the population using the internet in 20254. In The Netherlands, Norway and Saudi Arabia, 99 percent of the population used the internet as of February 2025. North Korea was at the opposite end of the spectrum, with virtually no internet usage penetration among the general population, ranking last worldwide. Eastern Asia was home to the largest number of online users worldwide – over 1.34 billion at the latest count. Southern Asia ranked second, with around 1.2 billion internet users. China, India, and the United States rank ahead of other countries worldwide by the number of internet users. Worldwide internet user demographics As of 2024, the share of female internet users worldwide was 65 percent, five percent less than that of men. Gender disparity in internet usage was bigger in African countries, with around a ten percent difference. Worldwide regions, like the Commonwealth of Independent States and Europe, showed a smaller usage gap between these two genders. As of 2024, global internet usage was higher among individuals between 15 and 24 years old across all regions, with young people in Europe representing the most significant usage penetration, 98 percent. In comparison, the worldwide average for the age group 15–24 years was 79 percent. The income level of the countries was also an essential factor for internet access, as 93 percent of the population of the countries with high income reportedly used the internet, as opposed to only 27 percent of the low-income markets.

In 2024, children in the United Kingdom spent an average of *** minutes per day on TikTok. This was followed by Instagram, as children in the UK reported using the app for an average of ** minutes daily. Children in the UK aged between four and 18 years also used Facebook for ** minutes a day on average in the measured period. Mobile ownership and usage among UK children In 2021, around ** percent of kids aged between eight and 11 years in the UK owned a smartphone, while children aged between five and seven having access to their own device were approximately ** percent. Mobile phones were also the second most popular devices used to access the web by children aged between eight and 11 years, as tablet computers were still the most popular option for users aged between three and 11 years. Children were not immune to the popularity acquired by short video format content in 2020 and 2021, spending an average of ** minutes per day engaging with TikTok, as well as over ** minutes on the YouTube app in 2021. Children data protection In 2021, ** percent of U.S. parents and ** percent of UK parents reported being slightly concerned with their children’s device usage habits. While the share of parents reporting to be very or extremely concerned was considerably smaller, children are considered among the most vulnerable digital audiences and need additional attention when it comes to data and privacy protection. According to a study conducted during the first quarter of 2022, ** percent of children’s apps hosted in the Google Play Store and ** percent of apps hosted in the Apple App Store transmitted users’ locations to advertisers. Additionally, ** percent of kids’ apps were found to collect persistent identifiers, such as users’ IP addresses, which could potentially lead to Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) violations in the United States. In the United Kingdom, companies have to take into account several obligations when considering online environments for children, including an age-appropriate design and avoiding sharing children’s data.

According to a global survey conducted in 2021, heavier social media users felt more strongly about the effects of social media on social wellbeing. Overall, 33 percent of respondents who spent more than three hours per day on social media said that usage of such online platforms negatively impacted social wellbeing such as not feeling close to others or not being part of a supportive community. In contrast, of respondents who spent just one hour per day on social media, only 20 percent felt that social media harmed social wellbeing.

TikTok is an online platform, initially launched in September 2016 in China, with the purpose of promoting video sharing among social media users. In 2021, TikTok was a highly engaging app for Polish users. One-third of women spent more than *** hours per day using the app.