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.

The global number of Facebook users was forecast to continuously increase between 2023 and 2027 by in total 391 million users (+14.36 percent). After the fourth consecutive increasing year, the Facebook user base is estimated to reach 3.1 billion users and therefore a new peak in 2027. Notably, the number of Facebook users was continuously increasing over the past years. User figures, shown here regarding the platform Facebook, 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).

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.

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! 🌍

Gain valuable insights with our comprehensive Social Media Dataset, designed to help businesses, marketers, and analysts track trends, monitor engagement, and optimize strategies. This dataset provides structured and reliable social media data from multiple platforms.

Dataset Features

User Profiles: Access public social media profiles, including usernames, bios, follower counts, engagement metrics, and more. Ideal for audience analysis, influencer marketing, and competitive research. Posts & Content: Extract posts, captions, hashtags, media (images/videos), timestamps, and engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. Useful for trend analysis, sentiment tracking, and content strategy optimization. Comments & Interactions: Analyze user interactions, including replies, mentions, and discussions. This data helps brands understand audience sentiment and engagement patterns. Hashtag & Trend Tracking: Monitor trending hashtags, topics, and viral content across platforms to stay ahead of industry trends and consumer interests.

Customizable Subsets for Specific Needs Our Social Media Dataset is fully customizable, allowing you to filter data based on platform, region, keywords, engagement levels, or specific user profiles. Whether you need a broad dataset for market research or a focused subset for brand monitoring, we tailor the dataset to your needs.

Popular Use Cases

Brand Monitoring & Reputation Management: Track brand mentions, customer feedback, and sentiment analysis to manage online reputation effectively. Influencer Marketing & Audience Analysis: Identify key influencers, analyze engagement metrics, and optimize influencer partnerships. Competitive Intelligence: Monitor competitor activity, content performance, and audience engagement to refine marketing strategies. Market Research & Consumer Insights: Analyze social media trends, customer preferences, and emerging topics to inform business decisions. AI & Predictive Analytics: Leverage structured social media data for AI-driven trend forecasting, sentiment analysis, and automated content recommendations.

Whether you're tracking brand sentiment, analyzing audience engagement, or monitoring industry trends, our Social Media Dataset provides the structured data you need. Get started today and customize your dataset to fit your business objectives.

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 dataset is structured as a graph, where nodes represent users and edges capture their interactions, including tweets, retweets, replies, and mentions. Each node provides detailed user attributes, such as unique ID, follower and following counts, and verification status, offering insights into each user's identity, role, and influence in the mental health discourse. The edges illustrate user interactions, highlighting engagement patterns and types of content that drive responses, such as tweet impressions. This interconnected structure enables sentiment analysis and public reaction studies, allowing researchers to explore engagement trends and identify the mental health topics that resonate most with users.

The dataset consists of three files: 1. Edges Data: Contains graph data essential for social network analysis, including fields for UserID (Source), UserID (Destination), Post/Tweet ID, and Date of Relationship. This file enables analysis of user connections without including tweet content, maintaining compliance with Twitter/X’s data-sharing policies. 2. Nodes Data: Offers user-specific details relevant to network analysis, including UserID, Account Creation Date, Follower and Following counts, Verified Status, and Date Joined Twitter. This file allows researchers to examine user behavior (e.g., identifying influential users or spam-like accounts) without direct reference to tweet content. 3. Twitter/X Content Data: This file contains only the raw tweet text as a single-column dataset, without associated user identifiers or metadata. By isolating the text, we ensure alignment with anonymization standards observed in similar published datasets, safeguarding user privacy in compliance with Twitter/X's data guidelines. This content is crucial for addressing the research focus on mental health discourse in social media. (References to prior Data in Brief publications involving Twitter/X data informed the dataset's structure.)

Youtube social network and ground-truth communities Dataset information Youtube is a video-sharing web site that includes a social network. In the Youtube social network, users form friendship each other and users can create groups which other users can join. We consider such user-defined groups as ground-truth communities. This data is provided by Alan Mislove et al.

We regard each connected component in a group as a separate ground-truth community. We remove the ground-truth communities which have less than 3 nodes. We also provide the top 5,000 communities with highest quality which are described in our paper. As for the network, we provide the largest connected component.

more info : https://snap.stanford.edu/data/com-Youtube.html

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.

This dataset provides comprehensive social media profile links discovered through real-time web search. It includes profiles from major social networks like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, Github and more. The data is gathered through intelligent search algorithms and pattern matching. Users can leverage this dataset for social media research, influencer discovery, social presence analysis, and social media marketing. The API enables efficient discovery of social profiles across multiple platforms. The dataset is delivered in a JSON format via REST API.

📊 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!

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.

Pinning down the role of social ties in the decision to protest has been notoriously elusive, largely due to data limitations. Social media and their global use by protesters offer an unprecedented opportunity to observe real-time social ties and online behavior, though often without an attendant measure of real-world behavior. We collect data on Twitter activity during the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protest in Paris which, unusually, record real-world protest attendance and network structure measured beyond egocentric networks. We devise a test of social theories of protest that hold that participation depends on exposure to others’ intentions and network position determines exposure. Our findings are strongly consistent with these theories, showing that protesters are significantly more connected to one another via direct, indirect, triadic, and reciprocated ties than comparable non-protesters. These results offer the first large-scale empirical support for the claim that social network structure has consequences for protest participation. The data were collected by the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory (https://wp.nyu.edu/smapp/), of which Nagler and Tucker are co-Directors along with Richard Bonneau and John T. Jost. The SMaPP lab is supported by the INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation (Award SES-1248077), the New York University Global Institute for Advanced Study, the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, and Dean Thomas Carew’s Research Investment Fund at New York University. In order to run the replication end-to-end, we recommend downloading the comprehensive archive (charlie-hebdo-replication.tar.gz). The archive contains all the files with the appropriate directory structure. Once the archive is expanded, the full replication pipeline may be executed by running the script run-all.sh in the scripts directory.

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

Pokec is the most popular on-line social network in Slovakia. The popularity of network has not changed even after the coming of Facebook. Pokec has been provided for more than 10 years and connects more than 1.6 million people. Datasets contains anonymized data of the whole network. Profile data contains gender, age, hobbies, interest, education etc. Profile data are in Slovak language. Friendships in Pokec are oriented.

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

Foursquare data downloaded from https://sites.google.com/site/yangdingqi/home/foursquare-dataset This dataset includes long-term (about 22 months from Apr. 2012 to Jan. 2014) global-scale check-in data collected from Foursquare, and also two snapshots of user social networks before and after the check-in data collection period (see more details in our paper). The check-in dataset contains 22,809,624 checkins by 114,324 users on 3,820,891 venues. The social network data contains 363,704 (old) and 607,333 (new) friendships. Due to frequent requests, we also include the raw check-in dataset containing 90,048,627 checkins by 2,733,324 users on 11,180,160 venues.

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

This dataset includes long-term (about 22 months from Apr. 2012 to Jan. 2014) global-scale check-in data collected from Foursquare, and also two snapshots of user social networks before and after the check-in data collection period (see more details in our paper). The check-in dataset contains 22,809,624 checkins by 114,324 users on 3,820,891 venues. The social network data contains 363,704 (old) and 607,333 (new) friendships. Due to frequent requests, we also include the raw check-in dataset containing 90,048,627 checkins by 2,733,324 users on 11,180,160 venues.Please cite our paper if you publish material based on this dataset:+ Dingqi Yang, Bingqing Qu, Jie Yang, Philippe Cudre-Mauroux, Revisiting User Mobility and Social Relationships in LBSNs: A Hypergraph Embedding Approach, In Proc. of The Web Conference (WWW'19). May. 2019, San Francisco, USA. + Dingqi Yang, Bingqing Qu, Jie Yang, Philippe Cudre-Mauroux, LBSN2Vec++: Heterogeneous Hypergraph Embedding for Location-Based Social Networks, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2020.

Bluesky Social Dataset

1st Dec 2024. This version of the dataset has been superseeded and is now restricted. Please refer to the most recent release.

Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data, thus hindering the advancement of computational social science as a whole. To address this pressing issue, we present a large, high-coverage dataset of social interactions and user-generated content from Bluesky Social.

The dataset contains the complete post history of over 4M users (81% of all registered accounts), totaling 235M posts. We also make available social data covering follow, comment, repost, and quote interactions.

Since Bluesky allows users to create and bookmark feed generators (i.e., content recommendation algorithms), we also release the full output of several popular algorithms available on the platform, along with their “like” interactions and time of bookmarking.

Dataset

Here is a description of the dataset files.

• followers.csv.gz. This compressed file contains the anonymized follower edge list. Once decompressed, each row consists of two comma-separated integers u, v, representing a directed following relation (i.e., user u follows user v).
• posts.tar.gz. This compressed folder contains data on the individual posts collected. Decompressing this file results in 100 files, each containing the full posts of up to 50,000 users. Each post is stored as a JSON-formatted line.
• interactions.csv.gz. This compressed file contains the anonymized interactions edge list. Once decompressed, each row consists of six comma-separated integers, and represents a comment, repost, or quote interaction. These integers correspond to the following fields, in this order: user_id, replied_author, thread_root_author, reposted_author ,quoted_author, and date.
• graphs.tar.gz. This compressed folder contains edge list files for the graphs emerging from reposts, quotes, and replies. Each interaction is timestamped. The folder also contains timestamped higher-order interactions emerging from discussion threads, each containing all users participating in a thread.
• feed_posts.tar.gz. This compressed folder contains posts that appear in 11 thematic feeds. Decompressing this folder results in 11 files containing posts from one feed each. Posts are stored as a JSON-formatted line. Fields are correspond to those in posts.tar.gz, except for those related to sentiment analysis (sent_label, sent_score), and reposts (repost_from, reposted_author);
• feed_bookmarks.csv. This file contains users who bookmarked any of the collected feeds. Each record contains three comma-separated values, namely the feed name, the user id, and the timestamp.
• feed_post_likes.tar.gz. This compressed folder contains data on likes to posts appearing in the feeds, one file per feed. Each record in the files contains the following information, in this order: the id of the ``liker'', the id of the post's author, the id of the liked post, and the like timestamp;
• scripts.tar.gz. A collection of Python scripts, including the ones originally used to crawl the data, and to perform experiments. These scripts are detailed in a document released within the folder.

Citation

If used for research purposes, please cite the following paper describing the dataset details:

Andrea Failla and Giulio Rossetti. "I'm in the Bluesky Tonight: Insights from a Year Worth of Social Data". PlosOne (2024) a https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310330

Right to Erasure (Right to be forgotten)

Note: If your account was created after March 21st, 2024, or if you did not post on Bluesky before such date, no data about your account exists in the dataset. Before sending a data removal request, please make sure that you were active and posting on bluesky before March 21st, 2024.

Users included in the Bluesky dataset have the right to opt out and request the removal of their data, in accordance with GDPR provisions (Article 17). It should be noted, however, that the dataset was created for scientific research purposes, thereby falling under the scenarios for which GDPR provides derogations (Article 17(3)(d) and Article 89).

We emphasize that, in compliance with GDPR (Article 4(5)), the released data has been thoroughly pseudonymized. Specifically, usernames and object identifiers (e.g., URIs) have been removed, and object timestamps have been coarsened to further protect individual privacy.

If you wish to have your activities excluded from this dataset, please submit your request to blueskydatasetmoderation@gmail.com (with subject "Removal request: [username]").
We will process your request within a reasonable timeframe.

Acknowledgments:

This work is supported by :

• the European Union – Horizon 2020 Program under the scheme “INFRAIA-01-2018-2019 – Integrating Activities for Advanced Communities”,
  Grant Agreement n.871042, “SoBigData++: European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics” (http://www.sobigdata.eu);
• SoBigData.it which receives funding from the European Union – NextGenerationEU – National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, PNRR) – Project: “SoBigData.it – Strengthening the Italian RI for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics” – Prot. IR0000013 – Avviso n. 3264 del 28/12/2021;
• EU NextGenerationEU programme under the funding schemes PNRR-PE-AI FAIR (Future Artificial Intelligence Research).