Quick Answer
How many people use social media worldwide in 2025?
4.9 billion people now use social media worldwide.
Social media isn’t just a space for connecting with friends and family anymore.
It’s become a major part of almost every organization’s and brand’s social marketing strategy.
One of the reasons social marketing has become so massive is due to the number of people using social media.
After all, big audiences result in better chances of positive marketing outcomes.
Social media marketing has become such a huge thing these days that it now has its own group of marketing strategies.
Marketing on social media used to be included in a digital marketing plan, and it still is, but today, it’s a strategy all its own alongside digital and conventional marketing plans.
In the next few paragraphs, we intend to discuss how many people use social media in the world, who uses social media, how people use social networks and the types of content with which they engage most.
Let’s look at this topic from the marketer’s standpoint.
How Many People Use Social Media Worldwide in 2025?
The most recent data shows that there were 3.6 billion social media users all over the globe in 2020, which accounts for about 49% of the world.
The projected figure for 2021 was 3.78 billion.
In 2023, the reported figure for the number of people using social media is 4.9 billion.
Social media is expected to continue to grow and thrive all over the world. It is considered one of the favorite activities among populations across the globe.
The increasing use of mobile phones, tablets, and other devices is believed to account for a large part of these social media growth figures.
Eastern Asia sits at the top of the global ranking for mobile device social media penetration, closely followed by the Americas and Northern Europe.
It probably won’t surprise you to know that the market leader in social media penetration is Facebook, with about 2.91 billion active monthly users across all demographics.
YouTube follows Facebook with 2.56 billion, with WhatsApp close behind at 2 billion.
Instagram has 1.48 billion users and WeChat has 1.26 billion.
TikTok is in the mix with 1 billion, and messenger boasts 988 million, working on that 1 billion mark.
According to data from January 2022, 58.4% of the global population is using social media.
The average daily usage of social media comes to 2 hours and 27 minutes from the same data.
How Do People Use Social Media?
2021 is the most current information we have on how social media users engage on their accounts.
As was initially intended, the top use of social media is staying connected to family and friends at 47.6%.
Following that use, filling up their spare time comes in at 36.3% and getting their news from social media ranks third at 35.1%.
Finding content they are interested in falls fourth with 31.6% a
Discovering what’s trending (what’s being talked about) is fifth with 29.5%. Another 27.7% of social media users seek inspiration for things to buy and things to do.
Finding products to buy (the group most likely to be ready to buy) comes in at 26.3%.
Discussing topics and sharing them with friends, family, and the world accounts for 24.5% of social media usage, closely followed by making new contacts at 23.9%.
Finally, live stream viewers make up 23.8% of social media users, and this segment is on the rise.
What Age Groups Use Social Media?
The first thing you should know is that as of 2021, 75% of the global population starting from 13 years old is using social media.
While there are some significant differences between age groups on certain social media sites, generally speaking, about 84% of adults between 18 and 29 claim to have ever used social media.
This figure is in alignment with the age group between 30 and 49 where 91% claim to have ever used social media.
For some comparative measures, 73% of adults between 50 and 64 say they use social media, but only 45% of people 65 and older use it.
The platform with the highest number of people between 50 and over 65 is Facebook, with YouTube not too far behind. The rates are still less than half among those 65 and over.
The platform with the most users between 18 and 29 is YouTube at 95%. In comparison, the same age group for Instagram users is 71%, for Facebook it’s 65%, and for Twitter, it’s a meager 42%.
For your information, social media users between 18 and 29 are also using TikTok the most at 48%.
Social media users between 30 and 49 are YouTube the most followed by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and then TikTok.
What Kind of Content Do People Engage with On Social Media?
It’s crucial for brands and marketers to know what type of content their audiences are engaging with the most on social media.
Without this data, it’s hard to reach out to your target demographic.
Giving target audiences what they want to see is important, and the way it’s presented is just as vital, maybe more so.
Here is some data related to content types and engagement.
91% of today’s consumers favor visual content over static media or textual content. To be clearer, interactive content such as images, games, and videos offer the biggest draws.
If you keep up with content types, you may already know that videos are at the top of the list for virtually all social media users.
Not surprisingly, posts that include images/photos achieve 120% more engagements than those without photos. Photos get 104% more comments and 53% more likes on social media networks.
Furthermore, if you’re trying to get people to click on a link, these kinds of posts receive 84% more click-throughs over textual posts.
According to data from 2021, video content makes up nearly 84% of all internet traffic. YouTube is one platform that contributes to driving this data.
Oddly, about 69% of consumers tend to watch videos online with their sound turned off.
Videos like Instagram Reels and others get 21.2% more engagement than posts with photos. In spite of Instagram image post popularity, videos dominate on this social platform.
Video posts not only dominate image posts, but they also receive 18.6% more engagements over carousels.
Brands and marketers are using social media link posts account for 49.9% of all social media posts. Brands alone (not including marketers) account for 44.2%.
Link posts are among the most popular on social media for brands, especially those that include videos or photos to drive attention.
Why Is Social Media Marketing Important to Marketers and Brands?
Firstly, you need to know that social media marketing is crucial to today’s brands and businesses.
Anything you want people to know about needs to be seen on social media.
Just look at the statistics on social media users worldwide, and consider the impact on information.
As if that’s not enough, even more people turned to social media for product searches, news, trends, and other information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
More people were working from home, some lost their jobs, people needed a way to connect to their friends and family, etc. The internet as a whole saw a noticeable boost in users, as did social media.
Likewise, social media outlets allow marketers and brands to connect with consumers, engage with them, build relationships with, and convert consumers into loyal customers. This is more true today than ever.
As a brand or marketer, it’s up to you to go to them before they know to come to you.
So, you need to know which social media platforms are being used by people within a variety of demographics.
Consider whether your audience is using YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the newer platforms like WhatsApp and TikTok.
To build a proper and effective social media strategy, you need to know who’s using what and how they are using it. We have provided some vital data related to that here in this article.
Conclusion
Now that you have some essential data about how many people use social media worldwide in 2025, how they are using it, who is using it, and what kind of content is most engaging to them, you can already create a better marketing strategy for your social media marketing.
You also need to know other demographics, which you can find in the sources we provided.
Remember that video content is king in today’s social media realm.
You can create and upload videos on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or at least share it across social platforms.
How will the data in this article impact your new social media marketing plan?
