Researching Social Media Usage

Purpose: This data compilation is designed to help researchers, students, marketers, and policymakers analyze patterns of social media adoption and engagement across demographic groups and geographic regions. By aggregating visualized data from national surveys, global digital reports, and usage behavior dashboards, the provides resources for users to compare who uses social media, which platforms dominate in different populations, and how usage intensity changes over time.

Sub-Genre: This data compilation falls under Digital Consumer Behavior Analytics, a sub-genre focused on understanding how individuals adopt, engage with, and interact with digital platforms over time. The data examines patterns such as platform preference, frequency of use, time spent per day, and demographic differences across age groups and regions.

Pew Research Center | Americans’ Social Media Use

Pew Research Center Social Media Use Landing Page

Pew Research Center offers robust, public-facing surveys with detailed breakdowns of social media platform use by age, demographic group, and trends over time. Their reports frequently include bar charts, line charts, and age comparisons that you can screenshot and annotate for your project.

How a user can use this: If a user wants to know whether the percentage of adults who have used a specific social media platform, they can use Pew Research Center's bar charts to identify which platform has had the most adults try it and gauge its popularity.

DATA REPORTAL | Digital 2026: 2 in 3 people on Earth now use social media

DATAREPORTAL Landing Page

DataReportal (powered by We Are Social + Hootsuite) published the Digital 2026 report, which features global usage data, including social media penetration, platform reach, and trends. This dataset is especially good if you want worldwide graphs (e.g., global user counts, penetration rates).

How a user can use this: If a user wants to analyze the total number of social media identities (or accounts), as well as key statistics regarding basic information about social media accounts compared to the world population, differences in usage by gender, and more. This is one of the most cited global dashboards for social media analytics, perfect for visuals like world maps and cross-country comparison charts in terms of social media geographic trends.

Statista | Daily time spent on social networking by internet users worldwide from 2012 to 2025

Statista Social Media Use Landing Page

Statista is a massive data aggregator that offers pre-made charts on global and regional social media usage, penetration rates, demographic trends, and more. Academic assignments love Statista because the charts are clean, shareable, and ready for comparison.

How a user can use this: Statista’s interface lets you directly grab bar charts, trend lines, and regional tables that you can drop into your research page. It’s ideal for data visualization sections, and there is a great variety in data, ranging from daily time on social media to number of social media network users worldwide.

User Walkthrough

If I was a user searching for basic global statistics on social media usage, I would first enter my website and read the "How a user can use this:" portion to identify which website aligns most with the content I want to research. Upon noticing that the second source, DATAREPORTAL, contains the information I want, I would click the hyperlink to look at their data.

On the DATAREPORTAL website, I can find global statistics easily by viewing the graphs. Even the first graph on the page contains the information I'm looking for, basic social media usage statistics that apply globally.