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.

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.

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.

Survey data collected in Canada, 2019. n = 1539. Using, Age, Facebook use and meme understanding to determine differences between demographics in relation to Instagram use

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.

Gen Z and Millennials are the biggest social media users of all age groups.

Internet use in the UK annual estimates by age, sex, disability, ethnic group, economic activity and geographical location, including confidence intervals.

This dataset is about countries per year. It has 194 rows and is filtered where the date is 2021. It features 4 columns: country, individuals using the Internet, and median age.

56.8% of the world’s total population is active on social media.

The results might surprise you when looking at internet users that are active on social media in each country.

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.

This anonymized data set consists of one month's (October 2018) web tracking data of 2,148 German users. For each user, the data contains the anonymized URL of the webpage the user visited, the domain of the webpage, category of the domain, which provides 41 distinct categories. In total, these 2,148 users made 9,151,243 URL visits, spanning 49,918 unique domains. For each user in our data set, we have self-reported information (collected via a survey) about their gender and age.

We acknowledge the support of Respondi AG, which provided the web tracking and survey data free of charge for research purposes, with special thanks to François Erner and Luc Kalaora at Respondi for their insights and help with data extraction.

The data set is analyzed in the following paper:

• Kulshrestha, J., Oliveira, M., Karacalik, O., Bonnay, D., Wagner, C. "Web Routineness and Limits of Predictability: Investigating Demographic and Behavioral Differences Using Web Tracking Data." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 2021. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.15112.

The code used to analyze the data is also available at https://github.com/gesiscss/web_tracking.

If you use data or code from this repository, please cite the paper above and the Zenodo link.

In this post, I'll give you all the social media addiction statistics you need to be aware of to moderate your social media use.

This dataset is about countries per year in New Zealand. It has 1 row and is filtered where the date is 2021. It features 4 columns: country, individuals using the Internet, and median age.

The average person has 8-9 social media accounts. This has doubled since 2013, when the average person just had 4-5 accounts.

The dataset consists of interviews with young adults on their experiences of voluntarily limiting their social media use. The interviews were divided into four sections. The first questions were related to the identification and initial stages of the interviewees' problematic social media use. The interviewees were asked to describe, among other things, at what point they started to consider their use of social media as problematic. The question also investigated how the interviewees had initially tried to manage their social media use and how they had sought help for the issue. The second set of questions explored whether the interviewees had experienced similar problems in the past and whether they had witnessed similar problems in their immediate circle or elsewhere. The third set of questions focused on what the interviewees thought had led to their problematic use of social media. The interviewees were also asked to reflect on whether there was anything specific in their own life at the time the issue started that could help to explain the development of the issue. Additional questions were asked about the treatment and support the interviewees had received, and how the problem was perceived by those close to the interviewees. The final set of questions charted the impact that problematic social media use had on the interviewees' lives, on their self-perception and on how they are perceived by others. The interview framework used was based on the McGill Illness Narrative Interview (MINI) interview protocol. Background information included the interviewee's gender, age group, and economic activity. The data were organised into an easy to use HTML version at FSD. The dataset is available only in Finnish.

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.

This dataset is about countries per year in Mozambique. It has 1 row and is filtered where the date is 2021. It features 4 columns: country, individuals using the Internet, and median age.

Data for a Brief Report/Short Communication published in Body Image (2021). Details of the study are included below via the abstract from the manuscript. The dataset includes online experimental data from 167 women who were recruited via social media and institutional participant pools. The experiment was completed in Qualtrics.Women viewed either neutral travel images (control), body positivity posts with an average-sized model (e.g., ~ UK size 14), or body positivity posts with a larger model (e.g., UK size 18+); which images women viewed is show in the ‘condition’ variable in the data.The data includes the age range, height, weight, calculated BMI, and Instagram use of participants. After viewing the images, women responded to the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), a state version of the Body Satisfaction Scale (BSS), and reported their immediate social comparison with the images (SAC items). Women then selected a lunch for themselves from a hypothetical menu; these selections are detailed in the data, as are the total calories calculated from this and the proportion of their picks which were (provided as a percentage, and as a categorical variable [as used in the paper analyses]). Women also reported whether they were on a special diet (e.g., vegan or vegetarian), had food intolerances, when they last ate, and how hungry they were.

Women also completed trait measures of Body Appreciation (BAS-2) and social comparison (PACS-R). Women also were asked to comment on what they thought the experiment was about. Items and computed scales are included within the dataset.This item includes the dataset collected for the manuscript (in SPSS and CSV formats), the variable list for the CSV file (for users working with the CSV datafile; the variable list and details are contained within the .sav file for the SPSS version), and the SPSS syntax for our analyses (.sps). Also included are the information and consent form (collected via Qualtrics) and the questions as completed by participants (both in pdf format).Please note that the survey order in the PDF is not the same as in the datafiles; users should utilise the variable list (either in CSV or SPSS formats) to identify the items in the data.The SPSS syntax can be used to replicate the analyses reported in the Results section of the paper. Annotations within the syntax file guide the user through these.

A copy of SPSS Statistics is needed to open the .sav and .sps files.

Manuscript abstract:

Body Positivity (or ‘BoPo’) social media content may be beneficial for women’s mood and body image, but concerns have been raised that it may reduce motivation for healthy behaviours. This study examines differences in women’s mood, body satisfaction, and hypothetical food choices after viewing BoPo posts (featuring average or larger women) or a neutral travel control. Women (N = 167, 81.8% aged 18-29) were randomly assigned in an online experiment to one of three conditions (BoPo-average, BoPo-larger, or Travel/Control) and viewed three Instagram posts for two minutes, before reporting their mood and body satisfaction, and selecting a meal from a hypothetical menu. Women who viewed the BoPo posts featuring average-size women reported more positive mood than the control group; women who viewed posts featuring larger women did not. There were no effects of condition on negative mood or body satisfaction. Women did not make less healthy food choices than the control in either BoPo condition; women who viewed the BoPo images of larger women showed a stronger association between hunger and calories selected. These findings suggest that concerns over BoPo promoting unhealthy behaviours may be misplaced, but further research is needed regarding women’s responses to different body sizes.

As of April 2024, it was found that men between the ages of 25 and 34 years made up Facebook largest audience, accounting for 18.4 percent of global users. Additionally, Facebook's second largest audience base could be found with men aged 18 to 24 years.

              Facebook connects the world

              Founded in 2004 and going public in 2012, Facebook is one of the biggest internet companies in the world with influence that goes beyond social media. It is widely considered as one of the Big Four tech companies, along with Google, Apple, and Amazon (all together known under the acronym GAFA). Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide and the company also owns three other billion-user properties: mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger,
              as well as photo-sharing app Instagram. Facebook usersThe vast majority of Facebook users connect to the social network via mobile devices. This is unsurprising, as Facebook has many users in mobile-first online markets. Currently, India ranks first in terms of Facebook audience size with 378 million users. The United States, Brazil, and Indonesia also all have more than 100 million Facebook users each.