GLOBAL Social Media OVERVIEW
As of July 2020, more than half of all the people on Earth use social media. Our latest data show that 3.96 billion people across the planet use social media today, equating to almost 51 percent of the total global population.
Put simply, that means that more people use social media today than do not.
This milestone is all the more impressive when we consider that most social media companies restrict use of their platforms to people aged 13 and above. In fact, the latest numbers indicate that nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the world’s total ‘eligible’ population now uses social media.
Adoption is still growing rapidly, too. Worldwide user numbers have surged by more than 10 percent over the past 12 months, with an average of more than 1 million people starting to use social media for the first time every single day since this time last year.
With more than 376 million new users since July 2019, that translates to almost 12 new users every second, suggesting that user numbers are growing even faster today than they were at the start of 2020.
The typical user has an account on almost 9 different social media platforms, and spends an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes using social media each day. That figure varies considerably across cultures, however, with people in the Philippines spending close to 4 hours per day on social media, while people in Japan spend an average of just 46 minutes per day using social platforms.
Facebook remains the world’s most widely used social media platform, but there are now six social media platforms that claim more than one billion monthly active users each. Four of these six platforms are owned by Facebook.
Based on publicly available data up to 16 July 2020, 16 social media platforms have 300 million or more monthly active users*:
Facebook has 2.603 billion monthly active users.
YouTube¹ has 2 billion monthly active users.
WhatsApp has 2 billion monthly active users.
Facebook Messenger¹ has 1.3 billion monthly active users.
WeChat (inc. Weixin 微信) has 1.203 billion monthly active users.
Instagram’s² potential advertising reach is roughly 1.08 billion.
TikTok has around 800 million monthly active users.
QQ (腾讯QQ) has 694 million monthly active users.
Sina Weibo has 550 million monthly active users.
QZone has 517 million monthly active users.
Reddit has 430 million monthly active users.
Douyin (抖音) has 400 million monthly active users
Kuaishou (快手) has 400 million monthly active users
Snapchat’s² potential advertising reach is roughly 397 million.
Pinterest has 367 million monthly active users.
Twitter’s² potential advertising reach is roughly 326 million.
Social media platform preferences vary from one country to another though, so it’s important to dig deeper into the data to understand what’s happening at a local level. For example, the map below – based on some great data from SimilarWeb – shows how messenger preferences vary around the world:
If you’d like to know more about social media use in individual countries, including local social media platform rankings and audience profiles by age and gender, take a look at our complete collection of local reports.
And if you’d like to stay up to date with all the latest developments in social media use around the world, sign up for our newsletter using the form below to receive notifications whenever we publish new reports.
Notes:
¹ These platforms have not published updated user figures in the past 12 months, so the user figures published here may not be as reliable as the user figures we’ve included for other platforms in this list.
² Snapchat and Twitter only publish daily active users (DAU) in their earnings announcements, as opposed to the monthly active user (MAU) figures published by other platforms. The figure we’ve reported here is based on the latest monthly advertising reach figures published in each platform’s respective self-service advertising tools, in order to provide a more equal basis for comparison.
LinkedIn no longer publishes monthly active user figures, and its monthly advertising audience reach figures are based on total registered members, not monthly active users (MAUs). As a result, it’s difficult to identify how many active users LinkedIn has each month. However, our calculations indicate that the platform likely has an insufficient number of MAUs to qualify for the ranking above.
* Note that we report both monthly active user figures and potential advertising reach figures for various social media platforms in our reports. Please read each slide carefully to understand which metrics we’ve used for each platform.