Social Media has become a part of our day-to-day routine, keeping users from across the world well-connected through digital platforms. With each passing year, social media is evolving at a rapid speed. With each passing year, the number of social media users is increasing at an immersive speed. Reports also suggest the number of social media users will reach a milestone of 5.85 billion in 2027.

In 2024, 62.6% of the world’s population will access social media, which clearly indicates the dominance of social media platforms in today’s world. In this article, we will examine social media statistics for 2024, uncovering monthly active users, daily time spent by users, most downloaded social media apps, etc.

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.

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.

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 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.

About Dataset This dataset captures the pulse of viral social media trends across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It provides insights into the most popular hashtags, content types, and user engagement levels, offering a comprehensive view of how trends unfold across platforms. With regional data and influencer-driven content, this dataset is perfect for:

Trend analysis 🔍 Sentiment modeling 💭 Understanding influencer marketing 📈 Dive in to explore what makes content go viral, the behaviors that drive engagement, and how trends evolve on a global scale! 🌍

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

The report provides a snapshot of the social media usage trends amongst online Canadian adults based on an online survey of 1500 participants. Canada continues to be one of the most connected countries in the world. An overwhelming majority of online Canadian adults (94%) have an account on at least one social media platform. However, the 2022 survey results show that the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in some changes in how and where Canadians are spending their time on social media. Dominant platforms such as Facebook, messaging apps and YouTube are still on top but are losing ground to newer platforms such as TikTok and more niche platforms such as Reddit and Twitch.

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

Please cite this paper when using this dataset: N. Thakur, “Mpox narrative on Instagram: A labeled multilingual dataset of Instagram posts on mpox for sentiment, hate speech, and anxiety analysis,” arXiv [cs.LG], 2024, URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05292Abstract: The world is currently experiencing an outbreak of mpox, which has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by WHO. During recent virus outbreaks, social media platforms have played a crucial role in keeping the global population informed and updated regarding various aspects of the outbreaks. As a result, in the last few years, researchers from different disciplines have focused on the development of social media datasets focusing on different virus outbreaks. No prior work in this field has focused on the development of a dataset of Instagram posts about the mpox outbreak. The work presented in this paper (stated above) aims to address this research gap. It presents this multilingual dataset of 60,127 Instagram posts about mpox, published between July 23, 2022, and September 5, 2024. This dataset contains Instagram posts about mpox in 52 languages.For each of these posts, the Post ID, Post Description, Date of publication, language, and translated version of the post (translation to English was performed using the Google Translate API) are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, and anxiety or stress detection were also performed. This process included classifying each post intoone of the fine-grain sentiment classes, i.e., fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutralhate or not hateanxiety/stress detected or no anxiety/stress detected.These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset for the training and testing of machine learning algorithms for sentiment, hate speech, and anxiety or stress detection, as well as for other applications.The 52 distinct languages in which Instagram posts are present in the dataset are English, Portuguese, Indonesian, Spanish, Korean, French, Hindi, Finnish, Turkish, Italian, German, Tamil, Urdu, Thai, Arabic, Persian, Tagalog, Dutch, Catalan, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Swahili, Afrikaans, Panjabi, Gujarati, Somali, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Estonian, Swedish, Telugu, Russian, Danish, Slovak, Japanese, Kannada, Polish, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Romanian, Nepali, Czech, Modern Greek, Albanian, Croatian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Welsh, Hungarian, and Latvian.The following is a description of the attributes present in this dataset:Post ID: Unique ID of each Instagram postPost Description: Complete description of each post in the language in which it was originally publishedDate: Date of publication in MM/DD/YYYY formatLanguage: Language of the post as detected using the Google Translate APITranslated Post Description: Translated version of the post description. All posts which were not in English were translated into English using the Google Translate API. No language translation was performed for English posts.Sentiment: Results of sentiment analysis (using the preprocessed version of the translated Post Description) where each post was classified into one of the sentiment classes: fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, and neutralHate: Results of hate speech detection (using the preprocessed version of the translated Post Description) where each post was classified as hate or not hateAnxiety or Stress: Results of anxiety or stress detection (using the preprocessed version of the translated Post Description) where each post was classified as stress/anxiety detected or no stress/anxiety detected.All the Instagram posts that were collected during this data mining process to develop this dataset were publicly available on Instagram and did not require a user to log in to Instagram to view the same (at the time of writing this paper).

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

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.

The Reddit Subreddit Dataset by Dataplex offers a comprehensive and detailed view of Reddit’s vast ecosystem, now enhanced with appended AI-generated columns that provide additional insights and categorization. This dataset includes data from over 2.1 million subreddits, making it an invaluable resource for a wide range of analytical applications, from social media analysis to market research.

Dataset Overview:

This dataset includes detailed information on subreddit activities, user interactions, post frequency, comment data, and more. The inclusion of AI-generated columns adds an extra layer of analysis, offering sentiment analysis, topic categorization, and predictive insights that help users better understand the dynamics of each subreddit.

2.1 Million Subreddits with Enhanced AI Insights: The dataset covers over 2.1 million subreddits and now includes AI-enhanced columns that provide: - Sentiment Analysis: AI-driven sentiment scores for posts and comments, allowing users to gauge community mood and reactions. - Topic Categorization: Automated categorization of subreddit content into relevant topics, making it easier to filter and analyze specific types of discussions. - Predictive Insights: AI models that predict trends, content virality, and user engagement, helping users anticipate future developments within subreddits.

Sourced Directly from Reddit:

All social media data in this dataset is sourced directly from Reddit, ensuring accuracy and authenticity. The dataset is updated regularly, reflecting the latest trends and user interactions on the platform. This ensures that users have access to the most current and relevant data for their analyses.

Key Features:

• Subreddit Metrics: Detailed data on subreddit activity, including the number of posts, comments, votes, and user participation.
• User Engagement: Insights into how users interact with content, including comment threads, upvotes/downvotes, and participation rates.
• Trending Topics: Track emerging trends and viral content across the platform, helping you stay ahead of the curve in understanding social media dynamics.
• AI-Enhanced Analysis: Utilize AI-generated columns for sentiment analysis, topic categorization, and predictive insights, providing a deeper understanding of the data.

Use Cases:

• Social Media Analysis: Researchers and analysts can use this dataset to study online behavior, track the spread of information, and understand how content resonates with different audiences.
• Market Research: Marketers can leverage the dataset to identify target audiences, understand consumer preferences, and tailor campaigns to specific communities.
• Content Strategy: Content creators and strategists can use insights from the dataset to craft content that aligns with trending topics and user interests, maximizing engagement.
• Academic Research: Academics can explore the dynamics of online communities, studying everything from the spread of misinformation to the formation of online subcultures.

Data Quality and Reliability:

The Reddit Subreddit Dataset emphasizes data quality and reliability. Each record is carefully compiled from Reddit’s vast database, ensuring that the information is both accurate and up-to-date. The AI-generated columns further enhance the dataset's value, providing automated insights that help users quickly identify key trends and sentiments.

Integration and Usability:

The dataset is provided in a format that is compatible with most data analysis tools and platforms, making it easy to integrate into existing workflows. Users can quickly import, analyze, and utilize the data for various applications, from market research to academic studies.

User-Friendly Structure and Metadata:

The data is organized for easy navigation and analysis, with metadata files included to help users identify relevant subreddits and data points. The AI-enhanced columns are clearly labeled and structured, allowing users to efficiently incorporate these insights into their analyses.

Ideal For:

• Data Analysts: Conduct in-depth analyses of subreddit trends, user engagement, and content virality. The dataset’s extensive coverage and AI-enhanced insights make it an invaluable tool for data-driven research.
• Marketers: Use the dataset to better understand your target audience, tailor campaigns to specific interests, and track the effectiveness of marketing efforts across Reddit.
• Researchers: Explore the social dynamics of online communities, analyze the spread of ideas and information, and study the impact of digital media on public discourse, all while leveraging AI-generated insights.

This dataset is an essential resource for anyone looking to understand the intricacies of Reddit's vast ecosystem, offering the data and AI-enhanced insights needed to drive informed decisions and strategies across various fields. Whether you’re tracking emerging trends, analyzing user behavior, or conduc...

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

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.

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

📊 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!

This dataset captures the pulse of viral social media trends across TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. It provides insights into the most popular hashtags, content types, and user engagement levels, offering a comprehensive view of how trends unfold across platforms. With regional data and influencer-driven content, this dataset is perfect for:

• Trend analysis 🔍
• Sentiment modeling 💭
• Understanding influencer marketing 📈

Dive in to explore what makes content go viral, the behaviors that drive engagement, and how trends evolve on a global scale! 🌍

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.

Please cite the following paper when using this dataset:

N. Thakur, “A Large-Scale Dataset of Twitter Chatter about Online Learning during the Current COVID-19 Omicron Wave,” Journal of Data, vol. 7, no. 8, p. 109, Aug. 2022, doi: 10.3390/data7080109

Abstract

The COVID-19 Omicron variant, reported to be the most immune evasive variant of COVID-19, is resulting in a surge of COVID-19 cases globally. This has caused schools, colleges, and universities in different parts of the world to transition to online learning. As a result, social media platforms such as Twitter are seeing an increase in conversations, centered around information seeking and sharing, related to online learning. Mining such conversations, such as Tweets, to develop a dataset can serve as a data resource for interdisciplinary research related to the analysis of interest, views, opinions, perspectives, attitudes, and feedback towards online learning during the current surge of COVID-19 cases caused by the Omicron variant. Therefore this work presents a large-scale public Twitter dataset of conversations about online learning since the first detected case of the COVID-19 Omicron variant in November 2021. The dataset is compliant with the privacy policy, developer agreement, and guidelines for content redistribution of Twitter and the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) principles for scientific data management.

Data Description

The dataset comprises a total of 52,984 Tweet IDs (that correspond to the same number of Tweets) about online learning that were posted on Twitter from 9th November 2021 to 13th July 2022. The earliest date was selected as 9th November 2021, as the Omicron variant was detected for the first time in a sample that was collected on this date. 13th July 2022 was the most recent date as per the time of data collection and publication of this dataset.

The dataset consists of 9 .txt files. An overview of these dataset files along with the number of Tweet IDs and the date range of the associated tweets is as follows. Table 1 shows the list of all the synonyms or terms that were used for the dataset development.

Filename: TweetIDs_November_2021.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 1283, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: November 1, 2021 to November 30, 2021)

Filename: TweetIDs_December_2021.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 10545, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: December 1, 2021 to December 31, 2021)

Filename: TweetIDs_January_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 23078, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: January 1, 2022 to January 31, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_February_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 4751, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: February 1, 2022 to February 28, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_March_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 3434, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: March 1, 2022 to March 31, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_April_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 3355, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: April 1, 2022 to April 30, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_May_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 3120, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: May 1, 2022 to May 31, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_June_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 2361, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: June 1, 2022 to June 30, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_July_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 1057, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: July 1, 2022 to July 13, 2022)

The dataset contains only Tweet IDs in compliance with the terms and conditions mentioned in the privacy policy, developer agreement, and guidelines for content redistribution of Twitter. The Tweet IDs need to be hydrated to be used. For hydrating this dataset the Hydrator application (link to download and a step-by-step tutorial on how to use Hydrator) may be used.

Table 1. List of commonly used synonyms, terms, and phrases for online learning and COVID-19 that were used for the dataset development

Terminology

List of synonyms and terms

COVID-19

Omicron, COVID, COVID19, coronavirus, coronaviruspandemic, COVID-19, corona, coronaoutbreak, omicron variant, SARS CoV-2, corona virus

online learning

online education, online learning, remote education, remote learning, e-learning, elearning, distance learning, distance education, virtual learning, virtual education, online teaching, remote teaching, virtual teaching, online class, online classes, remote class, remote classes, distance class, distance classes, virtual class, virtual classes, online course, online courses, remote course, remote courses, distance course, distance courses, virtual course, virtual courses, online school, virtual school, remote school, online college, online university, virtual college, virtual university, remote college, remote university, online lecture, virtual lecture, remote lecture, online lectures, virtual lectures, remote lectures