'Over 60%' of world's population uses social media

Nearly five billion people, or slightly more than 60 percent of the world's population, are active on social media, according to a recent study.

That represents an increase of 3.7 percent over the past year, according to calculations by digital advisory firm Kepios in its latest quarterly report on Thursday.

"Social media user numbers have continued to grow over the past 12 months too, with 173 million new users joining social media since this time last year," Kepios said in its report.

However, Kepios noted that social media figures may exceed the actual figures due to issues like duplicate accounts.

Users by region

There are major differences between regions. Only one person out of 11 in east and central Africa uses social media.

In India, now the world's most populous nation, the figure is one out of three.

The amount of time spent on social media has also increased, by two minutes to 2 hours and 26 minutes per day.

Here again, there are large disparities, with Brazilians spending an average of 3 hours and 49 minutes per day on social media while the Japanese less than an hour.

Most popular social media platforms

The average social media user is on seven platforms.

Meta has three of the favourite apps with WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.

China has three apps, WeChat, TikTok and its local version Douyin.

According to Kepios, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, with almost three billion monthly active users.

YouTube falls in second place with 2.5 billion users.

WhatsApp and Instagram are in third and fourth place, respectively, with two billion monthly active users for each.