Over the five years through 2025-26, industry revenue is forecast to expand at a compound annual rate of 20.3% to reach £12.5 billion. 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. 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 past five years, becoming the most downloaded app between 2020 and 2022, according to Apptopia. The short-form video platform has over 30 million monthly users in the UK in 2025. 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 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. In 2025, more social media platforms are using AI to boost user engagement. This improves click-through rates and drives higher advertising revenue. Industry revenue is expected to grow by 6.3% in 2025-26. Over the five years through 2030-31, social media platforms' revenue is projected to climb at an estimated 9.2% to reach £19.4 billion. 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 tightening of regulations will raise industry compliance costs, weighing on profit margin. Older age groups present a new revenue opportunity for social media platforms if they can bridge the gap between passive TV consumption and interactive digital engagement. Augmented Reality (AR) technology will move beyond filters to become standard for immersive product trials, interactive ads, and virtual meetups

As of the third quarter of 2024, WhatsApp was the most active social network among internet users in the United Kingdom (UK), with 79.9 percent of internet users reporting use of the service. Facebook was very close behind, with a rate of 72.3 percent, followed by Facebook Messenger with 56.6 percent. YouTube’s broad audience in the United Kingdom YouTube reaches a broad audience in the UK, making it an attractive partner for advertisers of almost any product. More than 75 percent of individuals of every income bracket watch YouTube, with the likelihood of watching increasing with the pay-grade. Whether advertising basic items or luxury products, marketers should be able to connect with UK audiences through YouTube. There are almost no people in the UK to not use YouTube at least monthly. According to a survey conducted in the third quarter of 2020, 46 percent of respondents went on YouTube on a daily basis. Facebook in the United Kingdom  Facebook enjoys a healthy market position in the UK, holding an estimated  55 percent share of the market. The service attracted  50.6 million UK users during May 2021, and Facebook UK Limited  generated 1.1 billion British pounds in revenue  during 2019. The UK division of the company  posted an operating profit of 121.9 million British pounds that year. 

In 2024, around ** percent of the population of the United Kingdom was active on social media. By 2028, it is expected that ** percent of the country's population will be using social media services. Social media's global reach As of April 2024, Northern and Western Europe possessed the highest rates of social network penetration globally, with **** and **** percent, respectively. Eastern and Middle Africa had the lowest coverage, with **** and *** percent. The global average was **** percent, which means that almost *** out of ***people around the world are using social networks. Other major platforms Although Meta continues to dominate the social media landscape in the UK, other social media brands are consistently getting more popular, especially with younger users. In 2024, video-sharing social media app TikTok had an awareness of over ** percent in the UK and a usage of over ** percent. Snapchat, owned by Snap Inc., had an awareness of around ** percent.

In 2025, Meta's Facebook held approximately ***** percent of the social network market in the United Kingdom, while X (formerly Twitter) accounted for approximately ******percent. Overall, Instagram held *****percent of the social network market in the UK.

We asked UK 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 26,710 consumers in the UK.

Employment statistics on the Social Media Platforms industry in the UK

Forecast: Individuals Participating in Online Social Networks in East Midlands (UK) 2024 - 2028 Discover more data with ReportLinker!

According to data from February 2025, Facebook was the most popular social network for news access in the United Kingdom, with ** percent of respondents using the service. YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) ranked second and third, with ** and ** percent of users respectively using the networks for news content.

A list of UK local authorities which are using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Also includes those with RSS feeds, web development blogs and open data.

In an online survey conducted during the third quarter of 2024, **** percent of internet users in the United Kingdom reported that WhatsApp was their favorite social media platform, whilst **** percent said that Facebook was their favorite. Overall, only around *** in *** users said that TikTok was their favorite social media service, even though brand awareness of the app is high in the UK.

United Kingdom E Commerce: Social Networks: Utilities data was reported at 44.600 % in 2016. This records a decrease from the previous number of 50.000 % for 2015. United Kingdom E Commerce: Social Networks: Utilities data is updated yearly, averaging 39.400 % from Dec 2012 (Median) to 2016, with 5 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 50.000 % in 2015 and a record low of 26.300 % in 2012. United Kingdom E Commerce: Social Networks: Utilities data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Office for National Statistics. The data is categorized under Global Database’s United Kingdom – Table UK.S040: E Commerce: Proportion of Businesses Using Social Media: By Industry.

In 2008, the average human attention span was 12 seconds. Fast forward to 2025, and many studies suggest it's now hovering around 8 seconds, shorter than that of a goldfish. It’s no coincidence that during this same period, social media platforms surged to dominate how we consume content. Whether you're...

This dataset contains ~11M tweets related to the 2019 United Kingdom General Election, published and collected between November 12, 2019, and December 12, 2019. In addition, we provide nodes and edges of the superspreader user similarity network, as described in the paper below.

Please, refer to the paper below for more details.

Nizzoli, L., Tardelli, S., Avvenuti, M., Cresci, S., & Tesconi, M. (2021). Coordinated Behavior on Social Media in 2019 UK General Election. In 15th International Conference on Web and Social Media. AAAI.

In detail, the dataset consists of:

• tweet-ids.csv.zip: a CSV file with the column "tweet_id," containing 11,264,820 tweet IDs related to the 2019 United Kingdom General Election, published and collected between November 12, 2019, and December 12, 2019.
• superspreader-nodes.csv.zip: a CSV file with the columns "id" and "cluster," relating to the nodes of the superspreader user similarity network mentioned in the paper.
• superspreader-edges.csv.zip: a CSV file with the columns "source," "target," and "weight," relating to the edges of the superspreader user similarity network mentioned in the paper.

Introduction In 2010, a small coffee shop in Portland decided to run its first Facebook ad. The owner spent just $20, targeting locals within a 5-mile radius. The result? A weekend rush that nearly tripled their regular traffic. Fast forward to 2025, and stories like this are no longer the...

This dataset comprises of two .csv format files used within workstream 2 of the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Orphan drugs: High prices, access to medicines and the transformation of biopharmaceutical innovation’ project (219875/Z/19/Z). They appear in various outputs, e.g. publications and presentations.

The deposited data were gathered using the University of Amsterdam Digital Methods Institute’s ‘Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset’ (DMI-TCAT) before being processed and extracted from Gephi. DMI-TCAT queries Twitter’s STREAM Application Programming Interface (API) using SQL and retrieves data on a pre-set text query. It then sends the returned data for storage on a MySQL database. The tool allows for output of that data in various formats. This process aligns fully with Twitter’s service user terms and conditions. The query for the deposited dataset gathered a 1% random sample of all public tweets posted between 10-Feb-2021 and 10-Mar-2021 containing the text ‘Rare Diseases’ and/or ‘Rare Disease Day’, storing it on a local MySQL database managed by the University of Sheffield School of Sociological Studies (http://dmi-tcat.shef.ac.uk/analysis/index.php), accessible only via a valid VPN such as FortiClient and through a permitted active directory user profile. The dataset was output from the MySQL database raw as a .gexf format file, suitable for social network analysis (SNA). It was then opened using Gephi (0.9.2) data visualisation software and anonymised/pseudonymised in Gephi as per the ethical approval granted by the University of Sheffield School of Sociological Studies Research Ethics Committee on 02-Jun-201 (reference: 039187). The deposited dataset comprises of two anonymised/pseudonymised social network analysis .csv files extracted from Gephi, one containing node data (Issue-networks as excluded publics – Nodes.csv) and another containing edge data (Issue-networks as excluded publics – Edges.csv). Where participants explicitly provided consent, their original username has been provided. Where they have provided consent on the basis that they not be identifiable, their username has been replaced with an appropriate pseudonym. All other usernames have been anonymised with a randomly generated 16-digit key. The level of anonymity for each Twitter user is provided in column C of deposited file ‘Issue-networks as excluded publics – Nodes.csv’.

This dataset was created and deposited onto the University of Sheffield Online Research Data repository (ORDA) on 26-Aug-2021 by Dr. Matthew S. Hanchard, Research Associate at the University of Sheffield iHuman institute/School of Sociological Studies. ORDA has full permission to store this dataset and to make it open access for public re-use without restriction under a CC BY license, in line with the Wellcome Trust commitment to making all research data Open Access.

The University of Sheffield are the designated data controller for this dataset.

In the spring of 2020, a simple tweet claimed that sipping hot water every 15 minutes could kill the coronavirus. No medical source backed it, yet the post quickly amassed over 150,000 shares. Fast forward to 2025, and we’ve learned that misinformation online is not a bug; it’s a system...

Indicators from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN) related to people’s social media use and attitudes towards elections in Great Britain.