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.

A survey conducted in January 2022 revealed that 18 to 25-year-olds constituted the largest share of social media users in India, with ** percent using six to nine social media platforms at a time. Contrariwise, nearly *********** of the respondents aged 56 and above claimed to not having used social media platforms. The source noticed that people residing in urban areas were using more social media platforms than those in rural areas.

Social media platforms have become integral tools in the conduct of foreign policy for many nations, including India. This dataset serves as a resource for analyzing ‘Social Media and India’s Foreign Policy: The Case Study of ‘X’ Diplomacy during the Covid-19 Pandemic.’ The data were collected through a web-based questionnaire distributed primarily to people aged 18 – 61 and above in India. A total of 171 valid data were collected from 17 states offering extensive geographic coverage and stored in Mendeley. The 15 contributor states are Goa, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Delhi, Assam, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. It encompasses diverse question formats, including single-choice, multiple-choice, quizzes, and open-ended. The study underscores the opportunities and challenges of employing 'X' diplomacy in India's foreign policy. Thus, there were two hypotheses. First, India's effective use of 'X' diplomacy positively impacts public perception of India's foreign policy effectiveness. Second, India's adept use of 'X' diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic enhances its ability to manage and respond to the crisis effectively. This data shows public perception of the effective use of social media by the Government of India, particularly in the crisis situation. Data also highlight the significant change in India’s narrative through its ‘X’ diplomacy, effectively setting the narratives, public perceptions, and diplomatic strategies. This data can be fully utilized in the study of the significance of social media in India’s foreign policy, the role of social media like ‘X’ in the making of India’s foreign policy, how effective social media like ‘X’ was during the Covid-19 pandemic and how Indian government utilized social media like ‘X’ to delivered messages and to set the narrative in the international politics.

*********************** and *********************************************** are the top two answers among Indian consumers in our survey on the subject of "Most common social media activities".The survey was conducted online among 26,759 respondents in India, in 2025.

Growing digitalization efforts combined with low data prices enabled a significant number of people to use the internet actively across India. Of these, about *** million were active social media users. WhatsApp and Instagram accounted for the largest penetration, at over ** percent and over nearly ** percent respectively in the third quarter of 2024. The rise of Facebook in India Hyderabad became the first Asian Facebook office registered under “Facebook India Online Services Private Limited” in 2010. The steady growth of the social network did not come without controversies. One of the most opposed collaborations that Facebook founded was internet.org, especially in India. The partnership with Reliance communications in 2015 caused controversy and was banned later that year. In recent years, the rise of fake news and its impact on politics has brought responsibility and content moderation to the forefront.   YouTube – the video-sharing social platform counterpart YouTube was largely inspired by two events according to one of its founders – one of which was the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The idea was the make sharing and finding videos easily available. YouTube consumption in India sky-rocketed with the Indian Premier League match streaming in 2010 with over *** billion views per day. Of course, this doubled with each season of the IPL thereafter. Furthermore, music videos were highly popular in the country. The evidence lies in the subscription growth of the music record label T-Series’ YouTube channel.

A Rakuten Insight survey on consumer attitudes to social media advertising, revealed that a majority of Indian consumers purchased products after seeing an ad on social media, albeit at varying frequencies in 2025. Around ** percent of the respondents admitted to sometimes buying an item after seeing a social media ad, while another ** percent did so often. Social media was one of the leading digital advertising formats employed in India.

When asked about the different social networks used to access news as of 2025, a majority of the surveyed respondents in India stated *******, and ******** as their main sources at ** and ** percent, respectively. X (formerly Twitter) had the lowest popularity for news access among Indians in that year.

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Social Media Listening Market Size 2025-2029

The social media listening market size is forecast to increase by USD 4.87 billion at a CAGR of 8.9% between 2024 and 2029.

The market is experiencing significant growth, driven primarily by the increasing usage of social media platforms worldwide. With over 4.3 billion users as of 2021, social media has become a powerful tool for businesses to engage with their customers and gain valuable insights into consumer behavior and preferences. A key trend in this market is the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies in social media listening solutions, enabling more accurate and efficient data analysis. However, this market is not without challenges. Data privacy and regulatory compliance are becoming increasingly important, with stricter regulations being implemented to protect user data.
Companies must ensure they have strong data security measures in place to comply with these regulations and maintain consumer trust. Additionally, the vast amount of data generated on social media requires sophisticated analytics tools to extract meaningful insights. As such, businesses seeking to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the market must invest in advanced analytics solutions and prioritize data security and privacy. By doing so, they can effectively navigate the challenges and stay ahead of the competition.

What will be the Size of the Social Media Listening Market during the forecast period?

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Social media listening has emerged as a crucial business tool, enabling organizations to gain valuable insights from the vast amount of data generated through social media activity. This data is analyzed using techniques such as topic modeling and sentiment scoring to understand consumer behavior, preferences, and trends. Social media geographics and demographics provide essential context, while social media reach and volume measure the scope and impact of conversations. Social media pulse and sentiment reflect the current sentiment and buzz surrounding specific topics, offering real-time insights into market dynamics and trends.
Social media listening software is a vital component of the global market for social media analytics. Social media influence is assessed through the size and engagement of an audience, providing valuable information for marketing and brand management strategies. The social media landscape and heatmap offer a comprehensive view of the social media ecosystem, helping businesses stay informed and adapt to evolving patterns.

How is this Social Media Listening Industry segmented?

The social media listening industry research report provides comprehensive data (region-wise segment analysis), with forecasts and estimates in 'USD million' for the period 2025-2029, as well as historical data from 2019-2023 for the following segments.

Type

  Software
  Services


End-user

  Retail and e-commerce
  IT and telecom
  BFSI
  Media and entertainment
  Others


Geography

  North America

    US
    Canada


  Europe

    France
    Germany
    UK


  Middle East and Africa



  APAC

    China
    India
    Japan
    South Korea


  South America

    Brazil


  Rest of World (ROW)

By Type Insights

The software segment is estimated to witness significant growth during the forecast period. This segment encompasses platforms and tools that offer real-time, automated, and scalable capabilities to monitor and analyze social media conversations across various channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit. Real-time monitoring is a key feature of these solutions, empowering brands to identify mentions, trends, and sentiment as they emerge. By staying abreast of evolving topics, businesses can respond promptly to customer concerns, capitalize on viral events, and maintain a strong online presence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies are integral to social media listening software, enabling advanced topic identification, sentiment analysis, and trend recognition.

These technologies enable businesses to gain valuable customer insights, inform product development, and enhance customer experience. Social media listening platforms also offer data visualization and reporting features, allowing businesses to analyze and present their findings in a clear and actionable manner. Additionally, they provide social media dashboards, alerts, and governance tools to ensure compliance with social media policies and ethical standards. In summary, social media listening software plays a pivotal role in the global market for social media analytics, offering real-time insights and advanced capabilities to help businesses navigate the complex social media landscape and engage effectively with their audience.

Get a glance at the market report of share of v

Snapshot img

Social Media Analytics Market Size 2025-2029

The social media analytics market size is forecast to increase by USD 21.2 billion, at a CAGR of 35.2% between 2024 and 2029.

The market is experiencing significant growth, driven by the expanding availability and complexity of social media data. Businesses increasingly recognize the value of social media insights to inform marketing strategies, enhance customer engagement, and gauge brand reputation. In response, social media platforms continue to roll out advanced targeting options, enabling more precise audience segmentation and personalized messaging. However, the surging use of social media data also presents challenges. Interpreting unstructured data from various sources remains a formidable task, requiring sophisticated analytics tools and expertise.
Companies must navigate these complexities to effectively harness the power of social media analytics and stay competitive in today's digital landscape. To succeed, organizations need to invest in advanced analytics solutions, cultivate data literacy skills, and establish clear data governance policies. By addressing these challenges, businesses can unlock valuable insights from social media data and capitalize on emerging opportunities in this dynamic market.

What will be the Size of the Social Media Analytics Market during the forecast period?

Explore in-depth regional segment analysis with market size data - historical 2019-2023 and forecasts 2025-2029 - in the full report.
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The market continues to evolve, offering valuable insights for businesses across various sectors. Hashtag tracking and sentiment classification help organizations understand public perception and engagement with their brand. Engagement metrics, share of voice, and trend analysis algorithms provide valuable data for brand reputation management and customer journey mapping. Social media ROI, influencer marketing metrics, and sentiment scoring offer insights into the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. User behavior patterns, predictive modeling, and anomaly detection enable businesses to anticipate trends and respond to crises in real-time. Social media listening, lead generation attribution, influencer identification, and customer satisfaction scores provide actionable insights for community management and crisis communication management.

Data visualization dashboards and social listening tools facilitate effective audience segmentation and conversational AI. Reach forecasting, content performance, keyword analysis, and campaign effectiveness metrics offer valuable insights for optimizing social media strategies. Platform-specific insights enable businesses to tailor their approach to each social media channel. According to recent market research, the market is expected to grow by over 15% annually, reflecting the increasing importance of social media data for businesses. For instance, a retail company used social media listening tools to monitor customer conversations and identified a trend in customer complaints about product packaging. The company responded by redesigning the packaging, resulting in a 12% increase in sales.

This example highlights the potential impact of social media analytics on business performance.

How is this Social Media Analytics Industry segmented?

The social media analytics industry research report provides comprehensive data (region-wise segment analysis), with forecasts and estimates in 'USD million' for the period 2025-2029, as well as historical data from 2019-2023 for the following segments.

End-user

  Retail
  Government
  Media and entertainment
  Travel
  Others


Application

  Sales and marketing management
  Customer experience management
  Competitive intelligence
  Risk management
  Public safety and law enforcement


Deployment

  On-premises
  Cloud


Type

  Predictive analytics
  Prescriptive analytics
  Descriptive analytics
  Diagnostics analytics


Geography

  North America

    US
    Canada


  Europe

    France
    Germany
    Italy
    UK


  APAC

    China
    India
    Japan
    South Korea


  Rest of World (ROW)

By End-user Insights

The retail segment is estimated to witness significant growth during the forecast period.

Social media analytics plays a pivotal role in retail marketing, enabling businesses to track and analyze customer engagement, sentiment, and trends in real-time. Tools such as hashtag tracking, sentiment classification, and engagement metrics help retailers understand their audience's preferences and behavior patterns. Share of voice and trend analysis algorithms provide insights into market dynamics and brand reputation management. Customer journey mapping and social media ROI measurement allow businesses to optimize their marketing strategies and improve sales. Influencer marketing metrics, sentiment scoring, and advertising campai

Databases of highly networked individuals have been indispensable in studying narratives and influence on social media. To support studies on Twitter in India, we present a systematically categorized database of accounts of influence on Twitter in India, identified and annotated through an iterative process of friends, networks, and self-described profile information, verified manually. We built an initial set of accounts based on the friend network of a seed set of accounts based on real-world renown in various fields, and then snowballed friends of friends" multiple times, and rank ordered individuals based on the number of in-group connections, and overall followers. We then manually classified identified accounts under the categories of entertainment, sports, business, government, institutions, journalism, civil society accounts that have independent standing outside of social media, as well as a category ofdigital first" referring to accounts that derive their primary influence from online activity. Overall, we annotated 11580 unique accounts across all categories. The database is useful studying various questions related to the role of influencers in polarisation, misinformation, extreme speech, political discourse etc.

With the ease of internet access, the number of social media users in India stood at 518 million in 2020. Furthermore, the social network users in the country were expected to be almost 1.5 billion in 2040. Facebook remained the popular choice among the social media platforms as of 2020. What was the attraction and who was attracted to it? The Indian Premier League, an annual cricket tournament conducted across major cities in the country might hold the answer. The IPL, one in many cricketing events followed religiously in India, had the highest attendance among all cricket leagues worldwide. Apart from the attendance, fans seemed to be keen on updates about their favorite teams. The IPL teams registered over 59 million likes on Facebook alone and more than 81 million followers on Twitter. Most of the Facebook usage came from the younger generation, aged between 18-24 years to be precise, with over 97 million users in 2018. How was this achieved? Increased availability of internet connections and access in recent years, propelled by the central government's Digital India initiative was directly proportional in the growth of social media users. Internet penetration had been on the rise with over 34 percent of the Indians being able to access the internet in 2017, which made the South Asian country the second largest market globally after China.

Each token in the dataset is labeled with a language code like 'en' for English, 'hi' for Hindi, and 'rest' for other or unclassified tokens. Corresponding entity tags follow the BIO tagging format, denoting the beginning (B), inside (I), or outside (O) of named entities such as PERSON, PLACE, or ORGANISATION. The data is sourced from social platforms like Twitter and includes features like mentions, hashtags, emojis, and links, reflecting real-world language complexity.

Dataset

This dataset was created by Shanawaz Sheikh

Contents

The social media user penetration in India was forecast to continuously increase between 2023 and 2028 by 22.4 percentage points. According to this forecast in 2028, the penetration rate will have increased for the fifth consecutive year to 83.16 percent. Notably, the social media user penetration was continuously increasing over the past years.

The Citizenship Amendment Act (Bill) agitation, also known as the CAA Protest, began after the Government of India established the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) on December 12, 2019. These protests saw a lot of activity on news articles and social media Twitter that had propaganda. Thus,

464 news articles split sentence-wise and classified as propaganda or not,

597 tweets manually annotated considering 18 propaganda techniques

were collected as a part of a domain adaptation task performed by the authors. Please refer to README.md for more details.

Lok Sabha Elections: Phase One Candidates Social Media Details

A survey conducted by Rakuten Insight in February 2025 reported that the majority of Indian respondents, ** percent, had purchased regularly through social media platforms. In comparison, about ** percent of respondents had never purchased anything through social media.

BackgroundThe use of e-cigarettes is proliferating globally, especially among youth and even children. Marketing is a known risk factor for e-cigarette initiation, yet little is known of e-cigarette marketing on social media in low- and middle-income countries. This study compares e-cigarette social media marketing in India, Indonesia, and Mexico, three such countries with different regulatory environments.MethodsInstances of e-cigarette marketing on social media platforms were identified via the Tobacco Enforcement and Reporting Movement (TERM), a digital tobacco marketing monitoring system. Through systematic keyword-based searches, all tobacco marketing posts observed between 15 December 2021 and 16 March 2022 were included in the analysis. The final sample included 1,437 e-cigarette-related posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, which were systematically content analyzed by independent coders after inter-reliability (Cohen's Kappa K > 0.79) was established using a theory-derived codebook. The final data is represented in percentages and frequencies for ease of presentation.ResultsWe observed e-cigarette marketing online in all countries studied, yet there was variation in the volume of marketing and types of accounts identified. In India, where e-cigarettes were comprehensively banned, we identified 90 (6%) posts; in Mexico, where e-cigarettes were partially restricted, 318 (22%) posts were observed; and in Indonesia, where there were no restrictions, 1,029 (72%) posts were observed. In both India and Mexico, marketing originated from retailer accounts (100%), whereas in Indonesia, it was primarily product brand accounts (86%). Across countries, e-cigarettes were mostly marketed directly to sell products (India: 99%, Indonesia: 69% and Mexico: 93%), though the sales channels varied. Product features, including e-liquid flavors, device colors and technical specifications, was the most prominent message framing (India: 86%; Mexico: 73%; Indonesia: 58%). Harm reduction messaging was most popular in Mexico (8%) and was not common in Indonesia (0.3%) or India (0%).ConclusionOur study provides important insights for tobacco control stakeholders on the evolving nature of e-cigarette marketing in low- and middle-income countries. It underscores the presence of e-cigarette marketing, including in countries where comprehensive regulations exist, and suggests the importance of continuous monitoring to keep up with industry practices and strengthen tobacco control stakeholder efforts to counter them.

YouTube was the **** used social media app in India as of November 2024, with each user spending an average of ** hours and ** minutes per month on the online video platform. Facebook and Instagram were the ****** and ********** used apps.

According to a survey conducted by Rakuten Insight in February 2025 reported that ** percent of Indian respondents preferred Instagram for social commerce. In comparison, ** percent of respondents chose YouTube for purchasing on social media.