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.

In 2023, Meta Platforms had a total annual revenue of over 134 billion U.S. dollars, up from 116 billion in 2022. LinkedIn reported its highest annual revenue to date, generating over 15 billion USD, whilst Snapchat reported an annual revenue of 4.6 billion USD.

Instagram’s most popular post

              As of April 2024, the most popular post on Instagram was Lionel Messi and his teammates after winning the 2022 FIFA World Cup with Argentina, posted by the account @leomessi. Messi's post, which racked up over 61 million likes within a day, knocked off the reigning post, which was 'Photo of an Egg'. Originally posted in January 2021, 'Photo of an Egg' surpassed the world’s most popular Instagram post at that time, which was a photo by Kylie Jenner’s daughter totaling 18 million likes.
              After several cryptic posts published by the account, World Record Egg revealed itself to be a part of a mental health campaign aimed at the pressures of social media use.

              Instagram’s most popular accounts

              As of April 2024, the official Instagram account @instagram had the most followers of any account on the platform, with 672 million followers. Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano) was the most followed individual with 628 million followers, while Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) was the most followed woman on the platform with 429 million. Additionally, Inter Miami CF striker Lionel Messi (@leomessi) had a total of 502 million. Celebrities such as The Rock, Kylie Jenner, and Ariana Grande all had over 380 million followers each.

              Instagram influencers

              In the United States, the leading content category of Instagram influencers was lifestyle, with 15.25 percent of influencers creating lifestyle content in 2021. Music ranked in second place with 10.96 percent, followed by family with 8.24 percent. Having a large audience can be very lucrative: Instagram influencers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom with over 90,000 followers made around 1,221 US dollars per post.

              Instagram around the globe

              Instagram’s worldwide popularity continues to grow, and India is the leading country in terms of number of users, with over 362.9 million users as of January 2024. The United States had 169.65 million Instagram users and Brazil had 134.6 million users. The social media platform was also very popular in Indonesia and Turkey, with 100.9 and 57.1, respectively. As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social network in the world, behind Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp.

Global ad spend were expected to reach over $134 billion in 2022. This means that it has increased by over 17% yearly.

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, although there is rapid uptake among older age groups. 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 last few years, becoming the most downloaded app between 2020 and 2022, according to Apptopia. The short-form video platform reported that it averaged revenue growth of over 450% between 2019 and 2022. 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 have 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. Revenue is expected to grow by 14.3% in 2024-25, constrained by a slowdown in user growth for most major social media platforms. Over the five years through 2024-25, revenue is forecast to expand at a compound annual rate of 32.8% to reach £9.8 billion. Looking forward, 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 rising prominence of AI will require the introduction of adequate regulations. The Online Safety Bill sets out new guidelines for social media platforms to abide by, with hefty fines in store for those who do not. Operating costs will swell as platforms look to meet consumers’ expectations, weighing on profit. Over the five years through 2029-30, social media platforms' revenue is projected to climb at an estimated 9.4% to reach £15.4 billion.

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.

A survey done in March 2022 found that 31% of Republican voters said they would use Truth Social often and 14% said they plan to use the platform a lot.

The ANES 2020-2022 Social Media Study was a two-wave survey before and after the 2020 presidential election and a third survey following the 2022 midterm elections in the United States. Data from these surveys are available as a public use file from the American National Election Studies (ANES) website. The three questionnaires have largely the same content, affording repeated measures of the same constructs. The questionnaire covers voter turnout and candidate choice in the 2020 presidential primaries and general election, the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, feeling thermometers, feelings about how things are going in the country, trust in institutions, political knowledge and misinformation, political participation, political stereotyping, political diversity of social networks, and campaign/policy issues including health insurance, immigration, guns, and climate change.

The Social Media Analytics market is experiencing robust growth, projected to reach $6.00 billion in 2025 and exhibiting a remarkable Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24% from 2019 to 2033. This expansion is fueled by several key drivers. The increasing reliance of businesses on social media for marketing, customer service, and brand building necessitates sophisticated analytics to understand audience engagement, sentiment, and campaign effectiveness. Further driving market growth is the proliferation of social media platforms themselves, generating ever-larger datasets demanding advanced analytical tools. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within these tools enhances the speed and accuracy of insights, allowing businesses to react swiftly to emerging trends and opportunities. Competitive pressures also force companies to adopt these technologies to gain a decisive advantage in market understanding and responsiveness. While data privacy regulations present a restraint, the demand for actionable insights continues to outweigh these concerns, with sophisticated analytics tools incorporating privacy-preserving techniques. Segmentation within the market includes solutions catering to different business sizes and needs, from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to large multinational corporations. Major players like Sprinklr, Synthesio, BrandWatch, Oracle, NetBase Solutions, Meltwater, Talkwalker, Sprout Social, Digimind Social, and Brand24 are shaping the competitive landscape through continuous innovation and strategic acquisitions. The forecast period of 2025-2033 promises even more dynamic growth. As social media usage continues its upward trajectory and businesses become more sophisticated in their application of analytics, we can anticipate increased demand for more advanced features such as predictive analytics, real-time monitoring, and sentiment analysis across multiple languages. The integration of social media analytics with other data sources, such as CRM and website analytics, will further enhance its value, enabling a holistic view of customer behavior and business performance. We expect to see continued investment in research and development, leading to improvements in data visualization, reporting capabilities, and the development of niche solutions tailored to specific industries. The growing adoption of cloud-based solutions will also facilitate accessibility and scalability for businesses of all sizes. Recent developments include: In May 2022, TikTok expanded its Marketing Partners Program, introducing its inaugural group of Content Marketing Partners. The founding member is Brandwatch, and its social suite of the future, which would allow its customers to scale, manage, execute, and optimize the content on TikTok, all while staying within the Brandwatch platform. This officially badged partnership between Brandwatch and TikTok empowers Brandwatch clients to manage, understand, and respond to their community profiles on TikTok in a way that feels native to the world's hottest technology platform., In April 2022, Digimind collaborated with Facelift to give essential tools for effective social media growth. Facelift is a firm that provides social media management tools. This collaboration benefited both industries in monitoring their brand image and effectively managing all social networks.. Key drivers for this market are: Exponential Growth of Number of Social Media Users, Increased Emphasis on Target Marketing and Competitive Intelligence. Potential restraints include: Exponential Growth of Number of Social Media Users, Increased Emphasis on Target Marketing and Competitive Intelligence. Notable trends are: Increased Emphasis on Targeted Marketing and Competitive Intelligence.

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.

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.

General data recollected for the studio " Analysis of the Quantitative Impact of Social Networks on Web Traffic of Cybermedia in the 27 Countries of the European Union". Four research questions are posed: what percentage of the total web traffic generated by cybermedia in the European Union comes from social networks? Is said percentage higher or lower than that provided through direct traffic and through the use of search engines via SEO positioning? Which social networks have a greater impact? And is there any degree of relationship between the specific weight of social networks in the web traffic of a cybermedia and circumstances such as the average duration of the user's visit, the number of page views or the bounce rate understood in its formal aspect of not performing any kind of interaction on the visited page beyond reading its content? To answer these questions, we have first proceeded to a selection of the cybermedia with the highest web traffic of the 27 countries that are currently part of the European Union after the United Kingdom left on December 31, 2020. In each nation we have selected five media using a combination of the global web traffic metrics provided by the tools Alexa (https://www.alexa.com/), which ceased to be operational on May 1, 2022, and SimilarWeb (https:// www.similarweb.com/). We have not used local metrics by country since the results obtained with these first two tools were sufficiently significant and our objective is not to establish a ranking of cybermedia by nation but to examine the relevance of social networks in their web traffic. In all cases, cybermedia whose property corresponds to a journalistic company have been selected, ruling out those belonging to telecommunications portals or service providers; in some cases they correspond to classic information companies (both newspapers and televisions) while in others they refer to digital natives, without this circumstance affecting the nature of the research proposed. Below we have proceeded to examine the web traffic data of said cybermedia. The period corresponding to the months of October, November and December 2021 and January, February and March 2022 has been selected. We believe that this six-month stretch allows possible one-time variations to be overcome for a month, reinforcing the precision of the data obtained. To secure this data, we have used the SimilarWeb tool, currently the most precise tool that exists when examining the web traffic of a portal, although it is limited to that coming from desktops and laptops, without taking into account those that come from mobile devices, currently impossible to determine with existing measurement tools on the market. It includes: Web traffic general data: average visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rate Web traffic origin by country Percentage of traffic generated from social media over total web traffic Distribution of web traffic generated from social networks Comparison of web traffic generated from social netwoks with direct and search procedures

A global study found that the number of referrals to news and media sites from Facebook fell from 2.3 billion in December 2022 to as low as 1.2 billion in November 2023, marking a 48 percent decline year on year. X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram also saw decreases in aggregate traffic to news and media properties.

Analysis of ‘State of Oregon Social Media Sites’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/2d043b33-3be3-42b0-be8a-d11763813e1d on 26 January 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

List of social media sites by agency

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

As of January 2024, #love was the most used hashtag on Instagram, being included in over two billion posts on the social media platform. #Instagood and #instagram were used over one billion times as of early 2024.

• Data from Amber Heard's Official Facebook Page before hidden in search from 2021
• Facebook Links Analysis from InformationTracer.com on Aquaman Change Petiton & "Amber Heard's 2020 Takeway: Adapt & Survive" YouTube Video
• Daily Scraper Data from June - July 2022 on Amber Heard with 10 hashtags

Public Research Study https://github.com/RescueSocialTech/Amber-Heard_Disinformation_Operations_Bots/tree/main/_Facebook%20Analysis

As of April 2024, around 16.5 percent of global active Instagram users were men between the ages of 18 and 24 years. More than half of the global Instagram population worldwide was aged 34 years or younger.

              Teens and social media

              As one of the biggest social networks worldwide, Instagram is especially popular with teenagers. As of fall 2020, the photo-sharing app ranked third in terms of preferred social network among teenagers in the United States, second to Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was one of the most influential advertising channels among female Gen Z users when making purchasing decisions. Teens report feeling more confident, popular, and better about themselves when using social media, and less lonely, depressed and anxious.
              Social media can have negative effects on teens, which is also much more pronounced on those with low emotional well-being. It was found that 35 percent of teenagers with low social-emotional well-being reported to have experienced cyber bullying when using social media, while in comparison only five percent of teenagers with high social-emotional well-being stated the same. As such, social media can have a big impact on already fragile states of mind.

Background [Extract from Related publication]: Current literature has provided substantial empirical evidence on how different types of factors influence prosocial behavior, but limited literature explores the relationship between online social media factors and their psychological influence on emerging adults’ prosocial behavior. Moreover, the majority of experimental investigations have utilized self-reported questionnaires or irrelevant economic games to reflect people’s prosocial behavior instead of measuring prosocial behavior demonstrated in real-life, natural settings. Considering the gaps in past research, the systematic review identified literature that explored the influence of social media on emerging adults’ prosocial behaviors in real-life settings to eliminate social desirability bias and accurately establish the effects of social media on emerging adults’ prosocial behavior.

Methods [Extract]: The data search was conducted from 14 to 30 April 2022 from seven multidisciplinary databases (Cochrane, CINAHL, ProQuest, PubMed, Ovid, Scopus, Web of Science). Quantitative and qualitative studies published since January 2004 (i.e., the beginning of social media) were searched. The following strategy was used to search the word “prosocial” and its synonyms in the title of the articles found in each database: (“Prosocial Behavior” OR Pro-sociality OR Prosocial OR altruism OR humanitarianism OR selfless OR "social concern" OR self-sacrific OR volunteer OR benefi OR help OR philanthropy OR kind OR charit OR benevolen). As second-level keywords, the terms "social media" OR online OR "social platform" OR "social media platform" OR "social service media" OR "social media website" OR "social networking website" were also searched across the articles’ titles, abstracts, and keywords. This level was included to focus on retrieving research that examines specific factors on social media as independent variables that influence individuals’ behavior. Each level of keyword(s) was connected by the Boolean AND.

The review search identified 21,772 titles after duplicates were removed. Published articles and grey literature (e.g., theses, dissertations) were eligible for inclusion. Based on initial exclusion criteria, studies that had no English records and did not have the search keywords in the title, abstract, and keywords of the articles were removed. Therefore, 21,746 articles from the search result were excluded after the title and abstract screening. Subsequent exclusion criteria removed articles that did not examine social media as an independent variable or did not measure the exhibition of prosocial behavior as a dependent variable (i.e., uses self-reported measures). As such, 17 articles were further excluded after the full text of the remaining articles was assessed based on the present study’s eligibility criteria. The full-text methodological quality assessment resulted in nine articles being eligible for data extraction and narrative synthesis.

This dataset consists of:

• 1 MS Word Document file containing the overview of the nine eligible studies
• 7 zip archives containing the 21,772 titles extracted for further analysis.

An extensive data summary is available in the Open Access publication from the Related publications link below.

Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most popular Instagram accounts as of April 2024.

              The Portuguese footballer is the most-followed person on the photo sharing app platform with 628 million followers. Instagram's own account was ranked first with roughly 672 million followers.

              How popular is Instagram?

              Instagram is a photo-sharing social networking service that enables users to take pictures and edit them with filters. The platform allows users to post and share their images online and directly with their friends and followers on the social network. The cross-platform app reached one billion monthly active users in mid-2018. In 2020, there were over 114 million Instagram users in the United States and experts project this figure to surpass 127 million users in 2023.

              Who uses Instagram?

              Instagram audiences are predominantly young – recent data states that almost 60 percent of U.S. Instagram users are aged 34 years or younger. Fall 2020 data reveals that Instagram is also one of the most popular social media for teens and one of the social networks with the biggest reach among teens in the United States.

              Celebrity influencers on Instagram
              Many celebrities and athletes are brand spokespeople and generate additional income with social media advertising and sponsored content. Unsurprisingly, Ronaldo ranked first again, as the average media value of one of his Instagram posts was 985,441 U.S. dollars.

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.