Facebook had the largest market share among social media platforms across India, at roughly ** percent as of October 2024. The Meta-owned social network site has consistently led the country's social media market since 2019. Instagram was the second leading social media platform during that period with a market share of over ** percent, reflecting a fluctuating trend that emerged in the previous year. 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.

*********************** 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 25,891 respondents in India, in 2025.

This statistic shows the most popular social networks in India in March 2013, based on their number of unique visitors. During that month, Facebook had 59. 64 million unique visitors. Second-ranked LinkedIn had ***** million unique visitors.

Social media in India – additional information

Growing internet access in India goes hand in hand with the growth of social media. Across the country, individuals, businesses and politicians are utilising social media, creating an online presence and taking advantage of its various usages. For the second quarter in 2014, India’s digital population had an estimated *** million internet users, of which *** million were considered to be active social media users.

With regards to the most popular social networking sites in India in March 2013, Twitter was ranked third. This popularity ranking may change in the future due to the number of Twitter users in the country. In India the annual user growth rate for Twitter in 2012 was ** percent from 2011. The number of users is expected to grow through to 2018 but at a much slower rate. For 2018 it is expected that Twitter’s growth rate will be **** percent from the previous year.

Interestingly, sites based in North America dominate the most popular social media networks in India. Social network penetration in India as of the second quarter 2014, was highest in Facebook with a ** percent penetration rate among internet users, followed by Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. The social network which ranked fifth was Orkut with a ** percent penetration rate among Indian internet users. The site, although owned by Google is operated and managed in Brazil as of 2008.

** percent of Indian respondents answer our survey on "Most used social media platforms by type" with "Instant messengers (e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat)". The survey was conducted in 2023, among ****** consumers.Find this and more survey data on most used social media platforms by type in our Consumer Insights tool. Filter by countless demographics, drill down to your own, hand-tailored target audience, and compare results across countries worldwide.

China was home to ove 1.18 bilion social media users in 2025, making it the country with the largest audience. It is expected that by 2030, the number of social media users in the country will exceed 1.3 billion. Additionally, India currently has around 874 billion users, and is estimated to reach 1.12 billion by 2023.

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.

We asked Indian consumers about "Social network usage by brand" and found that *********** takes the top spot, while ******** is at the other end of the ranking.These results are based on a representative online survey conducted in 2025 among 25,891 consumers in India.

The number of Instagram users in India was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 46.1 million users (+13.89 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Instagram user base is estimated to reach 377.99 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Instagram users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here with regards to the platform instagram, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.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 Instagram users in countries like Pakistan and Nepal.

During a 2025 survey among marketers worldwide, around 83 percent reported using Facebook for marketing purposes. Instagram and LinkedIn followed, respectively mentioned by 78 and 69 percent of the respondents. The global social media marketing segment According to the same study, 60 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 2025. 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.

A survey conducted in January 2022 revealed WhatsApp as the most used platform among social media and messaging apps in India, with ** percent of respondents using it many times a day. This was followed by YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The source revealed, despite the popularity of social media and messaging apps among Indians, three-fifth of the population never used these platforms,mainly due to lack of access to technology or smartphones.

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.

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.

As of April 2025, Instagram was slightly more popular with men than women, with men accounting for 52.5 percent of the platform’s global users. Additionally, the social media app was most popular amongst younger audiences, with almost 31.6 percent of users aged between 25 and 34 years. Instagram’s Global Audience As of February 2025, Instagram was the third 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 February 2025, the country with the largest Instagram audience was India with 413.85 million users, followed by the United States with 171.7 million users. Who is winning over the generations? Even though Instagram’s audience is considerably larger than 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 2024, generating 825.48 million downloads. As of 2022, Generation Z in the United States spent more time on TikTok than on Instagram monthly.

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.

According to a survey on influencer marketing in 2024, Instagram was the **** preferred platform for influencer marketing in India. YouTube followed by a wide margin. Both these platforms offered wider reach and higher engagement rates. Comparatively, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat were **** preferred.

According to a study on influencer marketing across India in 2024, Instagram was the leading platform for collaboration between influencers and brands in the country, as per ** percent of respondents. YouTube was the second-most popular choice. The increasing popularity of short form video content among Indian audiences resulted in both brands and content creators relying heavily on these platforms for marketing.

WhatsApp emerged as the most used social media app in India, with users spending an average of ** hours per month on the instant messaging platform in 2021. Facebook followed ******* with users spending just under ** hours on average on it per month. The government-imposed ban on TikTok contributed to higher engagement on Meta Platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram, among Indian users between 2020 and 2021.

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.

YouTube had an advertising reach of around *** million users across India as of January 2025. This was the largest audience reached via ads recorded in the country that year. Instagram and Facebook followed with approximately *** and *** million users respectively during the same period.

As of February 2025, it was found that men between the ages of 25 and 34 years made up Facebook's largest audience, accounting for 18.5 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.