No, social media is still not dying in 2024
Almost every week, a new headline decrying “the death of social media” finds its way into our feeds.
Somewhat ironically, these stories seem to gain particularly good traction on social media itself, generating widespread shares, significant numbers of views, and emphatic affirmation from commenters (“Yes, I deleted all my accounts last week!”).
However, there’s a problem with these headlines: they’re inaccurate.
The original social media meme
My first encounter with the “social media is dying” trope was a headline in the New York Times Magazine, which proclaimed a “Facebook Exodus”.
The article was published on 26 August 2009 – more than 14 years ago – and states:
“The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.”
For perspective, just 3 weeks after this article first hit our screens – on 15 September 2009 – Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had reached 300 million worldwide users.
And since then, Facebook’s user base has gone on to increase by a factor of ten, with the platform now reporting more than 3 billion monthly active users.
That doesn’t quite live up to the definition of an “exodus”.
The clue to this discrepancy lies in the article’s opening statements:
“If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.”
I’m sure these statements are all factually accurate, but they’re not representative.
Five people cannot provide statistically sound insights into the interests, preferences, and behaviours of 300 million people – especially if those five people have been hand-picked to “substantiate” a specific point.
A recurring theme
But more than a decade later, the mainstream media continues to propagate the fallacy that “social media is dying”, often with the same disregard for accuracy and representativeness.
One recent headline in The Atlantic officiously declared that “Instagram Is Over”, with the article beginning:
“Earlier this fall, while riding the subway, I overheard two friends doing some reconnaissance ahead of a party. They were young and cool—intimidatingly so, dressed in the requisite New York all black, with a dash of Y2K revival—and trying to figure out how to find a mutual acquaintance online. “Does she have Instagram?” one asked, before adding with a laugh: “Does anybody?”
This article appeared on 30 November 2022, shortly after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Instagram had just passed the 2 billion monthly active users (MAUs) mark.
That’s still Meta’s “official”, global figure for Instagram MAUs, but the company’s business tools allow us to see how Instagram use has evolved since that particular earnings call statement.
In October 2022, Meta’s advertising resources showed that ads on Instagram reached close to 1.4 billion active users around the world each month.
Since then, however, Instagram’s global ad reach has increased by more than 19 percent, and the platform has added more than a quarter of a billion monthly active users to its advertising audience.
And these numbers don’t really corroborate a claim that Instagram is “over”.
Of course, there’s every chance that two “intimidatingly cool” New Yorkers believed that Instagram was already passé in the autumn of 2022, but n=2 is a worryingly small sample when Instagram’s user base was already a billion times larger.
Correcting misconceptions
These are just two examples of many similar articles that have “done the rounds” in recent years though, and I’m sure they won’t be the last.
As a result, you may find that leadership, colleagues, and clients question and challenge you when you advocate for the use of social media at work.
However, data provides clear and compelling counterarguments to such misleading media headlines, and this article will present all of the latest, statistically representative facts you need to deliver an objective and reasoned response.
We’ll begin with the headline numbers, before going on to examine more granular and nuanced data.
Acknowledging the elephant
Before we begin that analysis though, it’s important to remember that statistics are only ever an input – not an answer – and we need to weigh numerous factors when evaluating whether social media is appropriate for our needs, especially in a professional environment.
In particular, reputable research (see 1, 2, and 3, amongst other studies) has found that social media can have a detrimental impact on users’ mental health and emotional wellbeing.
These findings should factor heavily in your evaluation.
However, reputable research also offers important perspective:
“The study concludes that social media can have both positive and negative effects on mental health, depending on how it is used and the specific features that are engaged with. It is therefore important for young people to be aware of the potential risks and to use social media in a balanced and responsible manner.”
In other words, social media is not without its challenges, but it’s not without its benefits either.
Striking a balance
We can only be objective if we acknowledge and explore both sides of an argument.
But with the mainstream media only seeming to report the negative sides of social media, finding that balance can be difficult.
This article will resolve that.
The societal and emotional aspects of social media’s role in our lives are beyond my expertise though, so this article will not cover those areas.
Instead, it will provide the latest facts about the use of social media around the world, using data sourced from platforms’ own tools, as well as research from a variety of reputable third-parties.
5 billion social media users
At the macro level, Kepios analysis of the latest data indicates that there are now more than 5 billion active social media user identities around the world.
For clarity, we use the term “social media user identities” because this figure may not represent unique individuals.
If we’re going to offer objective insights into the use of social media, we need to be clear about what we’re reporting.
The 5.04 billion figure that we published in our Digital 2024 Global Overview Report figure is based on the active user figures reported by the largest social media platform in each country.
However, as the platforms themselves attest, these figures may include a meaningful number of duplicate and “false” accounts.
For example, in its Q3 2023 investor earnings announcement, Meta states that:
“In the fourth quarter of 2022, we estimated that duplicate accounts may have represented approximately 11% of our worldwide MAUs. We believe the percentage of duplicate accounts is meaningfully higher in developing markets such as the Philippines and Vietnam, as compared to more developed markets. In the fourth quarter of 2022, we estimated that false accounts may have represented approximately 4-5% of our worldwide MAUs. Our estimation of false accounts can vary as a result of episodic spikes in the creation of such accounts, which we have seen originate more frequently in specific countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, and Vietnam.”
In other words, duplicate and false accounts could easily account for 15 percent of the company’s reported user figures for Facebook and Instagram.
However, because we focus on the largest platform in each country, the figures that form the basis of our calculations may actually under-estimate overall social media use.
For example, Facebook remains the largest active social media platform in many countries around the world.
But even in countries where Facebook is the most used platform, research from GWI suggests that Facebook users only account for about three-quarters of all social media users.
Our own calculations factor signals and data from a variety of different platforms though, and our analysis suggests that this approach delivers a close and representative approximation of actual, “human” use of social media.
So, while it’s critical to repeat that our 5.04 billion figure does not represent “people”, it’s still representative to say that active social media user identities equate to 62.3 percent of the world’s total population.
Share of internet users
For added perspective, our analysis of the platforms’ own data indicates that slightly over 94 percent of the world’s internet users visit and make use of social platforms every month.
Meanwhile, GWI’s survey of working-age adults across 53 of the world’s larger economies finds that more than 97 percent of internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 use social networks and messenger platforms each month.
And just for context, the countries in GWI’s survey account for roughly 87 percent of the world’s total internet user base.
However, because of platform age restrictions and reduced ownership of mobile devices amongst internet users below the age of 13, it’s likely that social media use amongst this cohort is considerably lower than 97 percent.
Similarly, our analysis of the platforms’ own data suggests that internet users over the age of 65 tend to use social media less than those in GWI’s working-age sample.
Moreover, internet users in lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs) tend to use social media less than people in the more advanced economies covered by GWI’s survey.
However, while data from GSMA Intelligence shows that social media use is indeed lower across these geographies than it is in richer nations, social media is still the top online activity in LMICs, and use amongst adults likely exceeds 90 percent.
All of which suggests that 94.2 percent is not an unrealistic figure for social media users as a percentage of internet users.
So, if you’re trying to build a case for social media marketing as part of a broader digital plan, you can safely and correctly assert that social media reaches almost all of the world’s internet users.
Social media users continue to grow
Our 5 billion user total makes for a great opening statement, but various other figures present even more compelling rebuttals to the erroneous claim that “social media is dying”.
Primary amongst these is the social media growth rate.
Our analysis shows that active social media user identities increased by 5.6 percent over the past year, with 266 million users joining social media during 2023.
Over the year as a whole, that means an average of 8.4 users started using social media every single second, but the figure for the last three months of the year was even higher, at an average of 9.4 users per second.
As one might expect, the figures for individual countries can be quite different to this global average, but the good news is that our local country reports enable you to see just how things are changing in the markets that matter most to you.
Time spent using social media
Of all the social media datasets in our latest report, the time spent using social platforms is the only one that might support a narrative of social media decline.
On average, social media users now spend 2 hours and 23 minutes using social media each day, which is 8 minutes lower than the daily average that we reported this time last year.
However, it’s important to stress that changes in GWI’s methodology may partly explain the decline between Q3 2022 and Q4 2022, and as such, I’d caution against reading too much into that step change.
Indeed, the average time spent using social media has remained relatively stable following that one-off “correction”, and there’s no evidence of a sustained decline in the time that the world spends using social platforms.
This is an important story though, so we’ve produced a separate, deep dive article into the amount of time that people spend on social media in 2024 – click here if you’d like to explore that in full.
Use of social media by age
Another common misconception is that younger people are abandoning social media – especially when it comes to Facebook.
However, while there’s no denying that behaviours and platform preferences vary over time and with age, and there may even be a small drop in the use of social media overall amongst younger users, there’s no evidence that teenagers are “deserting” social media.
Indeed, research from GWI shows that “Gen Z” and “Gen Alpha” internet users between the ages of 16 and 24 are still the heaviest users of social media, across a variety of metrics.
For example, people in this age group spend more time on social media than any other.
It is worth highlighting that women spend more time than men using social media, but even then, younger men still spend more time using social platforms than older men do.
And for added perspective, social media accounts for more of younger users’ overall internet time than it does amongst users in any other age group.
Admittedly, the figure for female users aged 16 to 24 is a tenth of a percentage point below that of women aged 25 to 34, but for that younger age group as a whole, social media accounts for a greater share of online time than it does for any of the older generational groups.
Meanwhile, younger people also tend to use a wider variety of social platforms each month.
GWI’s research reveals that social media users in the youngest age group make active use of 7.4 platforms each month, which is the highest figure across any of these working-age cohorts.
Individual platform use by age
When it comes to platform use by age, the companies’ own data offers some interesting findings.
First up though, it’s important to note that Meta has recently stopped publishing detailed audience data for users below the age of 18, and – because of EU regulations – it has also stopped showing adverts to users below the age of 18 across the European Economic Area.
As a result, we can’t use the platforms’ ad reach data to provide meaningful insight into use amongst younger teenagers.
However, these sources do indicate that users between the ages of 18 and 24 account for the greatest share of users on both Instagram and TikTok.
Users aged 25 to 34 account for the greatest share on Facebook and YouTube, but it’s important to remember that this age band accounts for a significantly larger number of people than the 18 to 24 group.
Because it includes an age range covering 10 years rather than just 7, the older age band is actually 39 percent larger, representing 1.19 billion people, compared with just 860 million for the 18 to 24 band.
And once we allow for this difference, the 18 to 24 age band likely accounts for a greater proportionate share of each platform’s users than any other age group.
Moreover, our analysis of audience reach data published in each platform’s own tools shows that users in the 18 to 24 age band have increased across all the top platforms.
However, GWI reports that the percentage of internet users between the ages of 16 and 24 who do not use social media has increased over the past year.
In the company’s Q3 2022 wave of data, 5.7 percent of respondents in this cohort said that they hadn’t used any social media platform in the past 30 days, but that figure increased to 6.4 percent in the data for Q3 2023.
For perspective, the share of respondents saying that they don’t use social media increased across all other age groups too, but at a slower rate.
GWI’s data indicates that 6.8 percent of internet users aged 25 to 64 did not use any social media platforms in Q2 2022, while that figure had inched up to 6.9 percent one year later.
However, because the overall number of internet users in each age group increased at a faster rate than these social media usage rates declined, the data suggest that the absolute number of social media users increased across all age groups, including amongst people aged 18 to 24.
So, while we’ll be keeping a close eye on those declines in GWI’s data in future updates, it would be wildly misleading to describe these changes as people “abandoning” social media.
But surely Facebook is dying?
Meanwhile, another common media trope is that “Facebook is dying”.
However, this claim is easy to disprove too.
Meta itself reports that Facebook’s user base is now the largest it’s ever been, and the platform added a further 91 million users to its monthly active total between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023.
The company reported 3.05 billion monthly active users in its most recent earnings announcement, which is 3.1 percent higher than the figure it reported one year earlier.
Meanwhile, the company’s own data shows that Facebook’s ad reach also increased over the past year.
For contrast, Facebook’s reported figure for global ad reach actually declined by 5 percent between October 2023 and January 2024.
However, our regular analysis of Facebook’s ad reach figures over the past decade suggests that this “decline” was likely the result of Meta’s annual “purge” of accounts that contravened its terms of service, and we believe that it’s unlikely this decline corresponded to a similar decline in “real” Facebook users.
As a result, the year-on-year increase of 10.5 percent is probably the more representative figure here.
And this latest data indicates that Facebook’s global ad audience grew by 209 million users over the past 12 months, to reach 2.19 billion at the start of 2024.
Admittedly, that’s not the highest number we’ve seen reported in the company’s tools, but – based on trends in previous periods – there’s nothing to suggest a sustained decline in Facebook’s ad reach.
Moreover, recent changes to legislation in the European Union have likely had an important impact on Meta’s ability to serve ads to Facebook users across the region, which may explain why ad reach figures show different directionality to the MAU trends that Meta reports in its investor earnings announcements.
Third-party perspectives
But just in case you’d prefer not to take the company’s own data at face value, let’s take a look at what third-party data tells us.
First up, data.ai intelligence reveals that active users of Facebook’s mobile app increased by roughly 2 percent between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023.
For comparison, the company’s analysis indicates that YouTube grew at roughly the same rate during that period, while Instagram’s monthly active app users increased by 7 percent, and TikTok’s increased by 13 percent.
Meanwhile, data.ai’s analysis reveals that the time people spend using Facebook’s app also continues to grow.
Users of the platform’s Android app spent an average of 19 hours and 47 minutes per month using the app between July and September 2023, which was up by 6 percent compared with the same period the year before.
And just for perspective, Facebook ranks third in terms of average time per user – behind TikTok and YouTube, but ahead of WhatsApp and Instagram.
Separately, Similarweb’s data shows that Facebook.com is still the third most visited domain on the web, with the platform’s website attracting an average of 1.15 billion unique visitors per month during 2023.
However, SImilarweb’s data does indicate a gentle decline in unique visitors to the platform’s dot-com over the past year, with the average falling from 1.54 billion per month in the last quarter of 2022, to 1.43 billion in the last three months of 2023.
For perspective, that represents a year-on-year decline of 7.2 percent.
Semrush also places Facebook’s dot-com domain in third place at a worldwide level, and reports that an average of slightly over 3 billion unique devices visited the site between September and November 2023.
However, Semrush’s analysis of global web traffic data indicates that unique visitors to Facebook.com actually increased by more than 5 percent over the past year, from 2.87 billion per month between September and November 2022, to the 3.03 billion we saw between September and November 2023.
Social media favourites
Lastly for this section, let’s take a look at platform affinity.
With the exception of YouTube, GWI’s regular survey allows us to track preferences for many of the world’s top social media platforms, and this data offers fascinating insights into how people “feel” about Facebook.
Sure enough, this data shows that Facebook doesn’t command quite the same levels of affinity that it used to, largely because of the rise of newer, “shinier” platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
However, the actual figures may surprise you.
In its latest wave of research, GWI found that Instagram is the world’s “favourite” social media platform, with 16.5 percent of working-age internet users choosing the platform above all others.
WhatsApp ranked second, with 16.1 percent, while Facebook ranked equal third, tying with WeChat on 12.8 percent.
But perhaps the key comparison here is with TikTok, which ranked fifth, on 7.4 percent.
But this ranking is undoubtedly skewed by the preferences of older users, right?
Well…
Yes, Facebook trails TikTok amongst users aged 16 to 24.
However, while there’s a meaningful gap between the two platforms amongst younger women, the gap amongst younger men is a lot smaller than you might expect.
And by the time social media users reach 25 years of age, both female and male users are significantly more likely to prefer Facebook over TikTok.
So, don’t let those media headlines fool you.
Yes, there are certainly some trends for Zuck and team to keep an eye on in all of this data, but there is nothing to imply that Facebook is anywhere close to “dying”.
Tracking social trends
Hopefully all of that data provides the evidence you need to counter any spurious claim that social media might be “dying” at the start of 2024.
However, things can change rapidly in the world of digital, so you’ll need to keep your stats up to date if you want to build the most compelling case for your plans.
And the good news is that we publish updates to almost all of the charts that I’ve featured here on a quarterly basis, so if you ever need to “refresh” your numbers, simply check out our latest Global Overview Report or Quarterly Statshot Report.
Disclosure: Simon Kemp is a brand ambassador for both GWI and data.ai.
Click here to see all of Simon’s articles, read his bio, and connect with him on social media.