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.

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.

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.

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

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

As of January 2025, ** percent of social media users in the United States aged 40 to 49 years were users of Facebook, as were ** percent of ** to ** year olds in the country. Overall, ** percent of those aged 18 to 29 years were using Instagram in the U.S. The social media market in the United States The number of social media users in the United States has shown continuous growth in the past years, and it is forecast to continue increasing to reach *** million users in 2029. As of 2023, the social network user penetration in the United States amounted to an impressive ***** percent, meaning that more than nine in ten people in the country engaged with online platforms. Furthermore, Facebook was by far the most popular social media platform in the United States, accounting for ** percent of all social media visits in 2023, followed by Pinterest with **** percent of visits. The global social media landscape As of April 2024, **** billion people were social media users, accounting for **** percent of the world’s population. Northern Europe was the region with the highest social media penetration rate with a reach of **** percent, followed by Western Europe with **** percent and Eastern Asia **** percent. In contrast, less than one in ten people in Middle Africa used social networks. Facebook’s popularity is not limited to the United States: this network leads the market on a global scale, and it accumulated more than three billion monthly active users (MAU) as of 2024, which is far more any other social media platform. YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp followed, all with *** billion or more MAU.

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

During a 2024 survey, 77 percent of respondents from Nigeria stated that they used social media as a source of news. In comparison, just 23 percent of Japanese respondents said the same. Large portions of social media users around the world admit that they do not trust social platforms either as media sources or as a way to get news, and yet they continue to access such networks on a daily basis.

              Social media: trust and consumption

              Despite the majority of adults surveyed in each country reporting that they used social networks to keep up to date with news and current affairs, a 2018 study showed that social media is the least trusted news source in the world. Less than 35 percent of adults in Europe considered social networks to be trustworthy in this respect, yet more than 50 percent of adults in Portugal, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia said that they got their news on social media.

              What is clear is that we live in an era where social media is such an enormous part of daily life that consumers will still use it in spite of their doubts or reservations. Concerns about fake news and propaganda on social media have not stopped billions of users accessing their favorite networks on a daily basis.
              Most Millennials in the United States use social media for news every day, and younger consumers in European countries are much more likely to use social networks for national political news than their older peers.
              Like it or not, reading news on social is fast becoming the norm for younger generations, and this form of news consumption will likely increase further regardless of whether consumers fully trust their chosen network or not.

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.

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

Facebook and YouTube are still the most used social media platforms today.

📊 Social Media vs Productivity — Realistic Behavioral Dataset (30,000 Users)

This dataset explores how daily digital habits — including social media usage, screen time, and notification exposure — relate to individual productivity, stress, and well-being.

🔍 What’s Inside?

The dataset contains 30,000 real-world-style records simulating behavioral patterns of people with various jobs, social habits, and lifestyle choices. The goal is to understand how different digital behaviors correlate with perceived and actual productivity.

🧠 Why This Dataset is Valuable

• ✅ Designed for real-world ML workflows
  Includes missing values, noise, and outliers — ideal for practicing data cleaning and preprocessing.

• 🔗 High correlation between target features
  The perceived_productivity_score and actual_productivity_score are strongly correlated, making this dataset suitable for experiments in feature selection and multicollinearity.

• 🛠️ Feature Engineering playground
  Use this dataset to practice feature scaling, encoding, binning, interaction terms, and more.

• 🧪 Perfect for EDA, regression & classification
  You can model productivity, stress, or satisfaction based on behavior patterns and digital exposure.

🧾 Columns & Feature Info

📌 Notes

• Contains NaN values in critical columns (productivity, sleep, stress) for data imputation tasks
• Includes outliers in media usage, coffee intake, and notification count
• Target columns are strongly correlated for multicollinearity testing
• Multi-purpose: regression, classification, clustering, visualization

💡 Use Cases

• Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
• Feature engineering pipelines
• Machine learning model benchmarking
• Statistical hypothesis testing
• Burnout and mental health prediction projects

📥 Bonus

👉 Sample notebook coming soon with data cleaning, visualization, and productivity prediction!

Dataset from Info-communications Media Development Authority. For more information, visit https://data.gov.sg/datasets/d_5bdc3fbb49cfdf6d4ea7d826cc88bc84/view

Regional use of social media has a significant effect on the male and female social media statistics.

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.

The results of which gender uses which platforms are in.

This database is comprised of 951 participants who provided self-report data online in their school classrooms. The data was collected in 2016 and 2017. The dataset is comprised of 509 males (54%) and 442 females (46%). Their ages ranged from 12 to 16 years (M = 13.69, SD = 0.72). Seven participants did not report their age. The majority were born in Australia (N = 849, 89%). The next most common countries of birth were China (N = 24, 2.5%), the UK (N = 23, 2.4%), and the USA (N = 9, 0.9%). Data were drawn from students at five Australian independent secondary schools. The data contains item responses for the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS; Spence, 1998) which is comprised of 44 items. The Social media question asked about frequency of use with the question “How often do you use social media?”. The response options ranged from constantly to once a week or less. Items measuring Fear of Missing Out were included and incorporated the following five questions based on the APS Stress and Wellbeing in Australia Survey (APS, 2015). These were “When I have a good time it is important for me to share the details online; I am afraid that I will miss out on something if I don’t stay connected to my online social networks; I feel worried and uncomfortable when I can’t access my social media accounts; I find it difficult to relax or sleep after spending time on social networking sites; I feel my brain burnout with the constant connectivity of social media. Internal consistency for this measure was α = .81. Self compassion was measured using the 12-item short-form of the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS-SF; Raes et al., 2011). The data set has the option of downloading an excel file (composed of two worksheet tabs) or CSV files 1) Data and 2) Variable labels. References: Australian Psychological Society. (2015). Stress and wellbeing in Australia survey. https://www.headsup.org.au/docs/default-source/default-document-library/stress-and-wellbeing-in-australia-report.pdf?sfvrsn=7f08274d_4 Raes, F., Pommier, E., Neff, K. D., & Van Gucht, D. (2011). Construction and factorial validation of a short form of the self-compassion scale. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 18(3), 250-255. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.702 Spence, S. H. (1998). A measure of anxiety symptoms among children. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36(5), 545-566. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(98)00034-5

Health organizations are increasingly using social media, such as Twitter, to disseminate health messages to target audiences. Determining the extent to which the target audience (e.g., age groups) was reached is critical to evaluating the impact of social media education campaigns. The main objective of this study was to examine the separate and joint predictive validity of linguistic and metadata features in predicting the age of Twitter users. We created a labeled dataset of Twitter users across different age groups (youth, young adults, adults) by collecting publicly available birthday announcement tweets using the Twitter Search application programming interface. We manually reviewed results and, for each age-labeled handle, collected the 200 most recent publicly available tweets and user handles’ metadata. The labeled data were split into training and test datasets. We created separate models to examine the predictive validity of language features only, metadata features only, language and metadata features, and words/phrases from another age-validated dataset. We estimated accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 metrics for each model. An L1-regularized logistic regression model was conducted for each age group, and predicted probabilities between the training and test sets were compared for each age group. Cohen’s d effect sizes were calculated to examine the relative importance of significant features. Models containing both Tweet language features and metadata features performed the best (74% precision, 74% recall, 74% F1) while the model containing only Twitter metadata features were least accurate (58% precision, 60% recall, and 57% F1 score). Top predictive features included use of terms such as “school” for youth and “college” for young adults. Overall, it was more challenging to predict older adults accurately. These results suggest that examining linguistic and Twitter metadata features to predict youth and young adult Twitter users may be helpful for informing public health surveillance and evaluation research.

During a January 2024 global survey among marketers, nearly 60 percent reported plans to increase their organic use of YouTube for marketing purposes in the following 12 months. LinkedIn and Instagram followed, respectively mentioned by 57 and 56 percent of the respondents intending to use them more. According to the same survey, Facebook was the most important social media platform for marketers worldwide.

Today the average time spent on social media is 2 hours and 24 minutes today for people aged 16 to 64.