A Look into Social Media Usage Around the World

Social media is taking over our society as we know it. It’s replacing our news, our entertainment, and so many other things. But how is this impacting different areas of the world. Is it more overpowering in some countries and cultures more than others?

TikTok is an extremely popular app. It’s grown exponentially in the past few years to now being one of the most used apps of this generation. But how does that popularity vary around the world? Let’s take a look.

In this map, you can clearly see which countries have the most TikTok users. The darker the color, the more users there are in that respective country. Here the USA clearly has the most TikTok users followed by Indonesia and then Brazil. It’s interesting that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company Byte Dance, doesn’t have many users from China, its country of origin.

But how does this compare to other social media apps? How do different apps perform in different countries? Let’s compare the World’s TikTok Users to another popular social media app, Instagram.

In this map, you can clearly see how India has most of the world’s Instagram users, followed by the USA and Brazil. This is interesting because India isn’t even mentioned on the TikTok map. But yet it’s the number 1 user for Instagram. What could be the cause for this difference?

Here is some insight to the data. TikTok is actually banned in numerous countries, one of them being India. So we can kind of see how without that TikTok outlet, people in India would be turning to a similar platform, like Instagram. It’s interesting to see this dynamic between different social media platforms and different cultures.

Let’s take a look into what different areas of the world actually use social media for. According to Digital Marketing Institute, 90% of people use social media to stream online videos. This would support the accolade that Youtube is the most popular stream app. But in certain areas of the world, like Asia, more of their social media time is used for communication, like texting and the use of the apps, WhatsApp and Facebook. These apps are used primarily for communication, rather than entertainment/streaming purposes.

Here in this map, from SimilarWeb, you can clearly see how different areas of the world have different methods for communicating. In North America, Facebook is a primary app for communicating. Whereas other places, WhatsApp is mainly used. This could be a link to cultural values around the world and how different people view and use social media differently.