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.

A global survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2023 found that the main reason for using social media was to keep in touch with friends and family, with over 49 percent of social media users saying this was their main reason for using online networks. Overall, 38 percent of social media users said that filling spare time was their main reason for using social media platforms, whilst 34.3 percent of respondents said they used it to read news stories. 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 January 2024, the social network had over three billion global users. YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram 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.

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.

As of 2023, the yearly social media advertising spending in the United States for X (formerly Twitter) has plummeted down from 12 to five percent. Facebook and Instagram's social media ad spend remained relatively stable from 2020 to 2023, with a slight drop of three percentage points, reaching 60 percent in 2023. TikTok's social media ad spend value has grown up to 14 percent in the country.

During a 2019/2020 survey carried out among owners of small and medium-sized enterprises from the United Kingdom, 27 percent of respondents stated they used Facebook to market their business. The same survey found that 75 percent of UK SMEs used social media for marketing purposes.

In 2020, the amount spend on advertisement per user worldwide increased around 3.5 U.S. dollars to 28.3 U.S dollars. According to the Statista Digital Market Outlook advertising spending per user in estimated to increase to almost 40 U.S dollars by 2025.

In early 2020 a study was conducted among global marketers to gauge their use of social media marketing. During the survey, 34 percent of respondents said they were uncertain about their ability to measure the return on investment (ROI) of their social media marketing efforts. However, 30 percent believed they were able to measure social media ROI.

Between the second half of 2019 and the first half of 2020, the loved brand on social media was Instagram. The social media platform had accumulated a total of 108.7 million "love" mentions across 104.7 million posts, generating 722 billion potential impressions and over 2 billion total engagements during the measured time frame. Second-ranked Amazon only generated 27.3 million "love" mentions.

In March 2023, Facebook accounted for 45 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. Pinterest ranked second with 21 percent of all U.S. social media site visits, while Instagram accounted for 14 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 81 percent of Facebook users across the globe were using the platform’s social networking services exclusively via mobile phone, while only 1.5 percent reported using their desktop or laptop devices. In October 2021, three Facebook Inc. products occupied the leading positions as most downloaded social networking apps on the Apple App Store in the United States. Facebook’s social media platform ranked first with nearly 2.5 million downloads, while Facebook-owned instant-messaging services Messenger and WhatsApp followed with 2.1 million and 1.4 million downloads respectively.

Social media evolution

Between 2012 and 2020, the daily time spent on social networks worldwide experienced a constant increase, with users reaching an average of 145 minutes per day in 2019 and maintaining the same engagement levels throughout 2020. 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.

During a 2020 survey carried out among senior level communications and marketing professionals in the United States, 32 percent of in-house professionals stated that Facebook was the single most important social media platform in terms of their broader content strategies. The same was true for 20 percent of responding agency professionals.

A 2020 survey showed that 89 percent of marketers believed Instagram was an important platform for their influencer marketing. The corresponding figure for YouTube was 70 percent. Other popular platforms include Facebook, blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn.

During a 2019/2020 survey carried out among owners of small and medium-sized enterprises from the United Kingdom, 29 percent of respondents stated social media helped raise brand awareness of their business. The same survey found that 75 percent of UK SMEs used social media for marketing purposes.

As of January 2020, Avista Advantage was the leading social media marketing software as a service (SaaS) company, with 267 million U.S. dollars in annual recurring revenue. Anonymous Content ranked second, with a revenue of 81 million dollars.

The number of social media users in the Netherlands was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by in total 0.9 million users (+6.74 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the social media user base is estimated to reach 14.3 million users and therefore a new peak in 2029. Notably, the number of social media users of was continuously increasing over the past years.The shown figures regarding social media users have been derived from survey data that has been processed to estimate missing demographics.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

Every year billions of dollars are spent on advertising on social media in the United States. In 2022, the amount reached 66 billion U.S. dollars, and included paid advertising on social networks as well as games and applications on social media. By 2025, advertisers are expected to spend over 82 billion dollars on promoting their products on social networks. Facebook commands the lion’s share of these expenditures (more than 80 percent), followed by LinkedIn and Pinterest with four and two percent respectively. Social network advertising – a closer look   Studies show that a little over 90 percent of U.S. companies are and will be using social media for marketing purposes. In 2017, social messaging and video were thought to be the trends of the future in relation to social media advertising and believed to have the biggest effect on marketing strategies. Lo and behold, advertising spending on social video has been growing ever since, and is expected to amount to nearly 15 billion U.S dollars in 2021. Even in this respect, Facebook has the lead, especially when it comes to influencer marketing. In fact, all tiers of influencers - from microinfluencers to celebrities - post the majority of their videos on Facebook. The second choice of platform to share their videos is YouTube, which despite being 'the' video sharing platform is not as popular yet among influencers most probably due to smaller user reach.

The number of social media users in Europe was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by in total 127.7 million users (+21.48 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the social media user base is estimated to reach 722.32 million users and therefore a new peak in 2029. Notably, the number of social media users of was continuously increasing over the past years.The shown figures regarding social media users have been derived from survey data that has been processed to estimate missing demographics.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).Find more key insights for the number of social media users in countries like the Americas and Australia & Oceania.

During a 2024 survey among marketers worldwide, approximately 83 percent selected increased exposure as a benefit of social media marketing. Increased traffic followed, mentioned by 73 percent of the respondents, while 65 percent cited generated leads. The multibillion-dollar social media ad industry Between 2019 – the last year before the pandemic – and 2024, global social media advertising spending skyrocketed by 140 percent, surpassing an estimated 230 billion U.S. dollars in the latter year. That figure was forecast to increase by nearly 50 percent by the end of the decade, exceeding 345 billion dollars in 2029. As of 2024, the social media networks with the most monthly active users were Facebook, with over three billion, and YouTube, with more than 2.5 billion. Pros and cons of GenAI for social media marketing According to another 2024 survey, generative artificial intelligence's (GenAI) leading benefits for social media marketing according to professionals worldwide included increased efficiency and easier idea generation. The third place was a tie between increased content production and enhanced creativity. All those advantages were cited by between 33 and 38 percent of the interviewees. As for GenAI's top challenges for global social media marketing, maintaining authenticity and the value of human creativity ranked first, mentioned by 43 and 40 percent of the respondents, respectively. Another 35 percent deemed ensuring the content resonates as an obstacle.

The average ad spending per internet user in the 'Social Media Advertising' segment of the advertising market in the United States was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2030 by in total 174.8 U.S. dollars (+66.25 percent). After the tenth consecutive increasing year, the average ad spending per internet user is estimated to reach 438.61 U.S. dollars and therefore a new peak in 2030. Notably, the average ad spending per internet user of the 'Social Media Advertising' segment of the advertising market was continuously increasing over the past years.Find more key insights for the average ad spending per internet user in countries and regions like the reach by social network in the 'Facebook' segment of the advertising market in Saudi Arabia and the ad spending in the 'Digital Video Advertising' segment of the advertising market in the world. The Statista Market Insights cover a broad range of additional markets.

Over the last two observations, the average ad spending per internet user is forecast to significantly increase in all segments. Concerning the two selected segments, the segment Social Media Advertising Mobile has the largest average ad spending per internet user with 34.29 U.S. dollars. Contrastingly, Social Media Advertising Desktop is ranked last, with 6.95 U.S. dollars. Their difference, compared to Social Media Advertising Mobile, lies at 27.34 U.S. dollars. The Statista Market Insights cover a broad range of additional markets.

The share of microblogging site X, formerly known as Twitter, in India's social media market bumped up to nearly three percent in December 2024. Since the social media platform was acquired by Elon Musk, the company has been embroiled in legal battles with the Indian government and faced stiff competition from Meta-owned platform, Threads.