Over 62.3% of World Population Active on Social Media as Users Hit 5.04 Billion Globally

A new report has shown that over 62.3% of the world’s total population uses social media.

According to DataReportal’s Digital 2024 Global Overview Report, social media users have increased to 5.04 billion at the start of 2024.

The top headline in DataReportal’s huge Digital 2024 Global Overview Report is that active social media user identities have passed the 5 billion mark.

The report also disclosed that social media users have grown by 5.6 percent over the past year, with 266 million new users in 2023 equating to an average increase of 8.4 new users every single second.

Kepios’s analysis of the latest data from around the world shows that the cumulative total of active users on the top platform in each country reached 5.04 billion by the start of 2024.

While this “user identities” figure may not equate to unique, human individuals, it still marks a momentous milestone on social media’s journey.

Social media user identities have increased by 266 million over the past twelve months, delivering year-on-year growth of 5.6 percent.

On average, that equates to almost 730,000 new user identities every day during 2023, at a rate of 8.4 new users every single second.

And despite the fact that social media growth has slowed considerably since the surges that we saw during the early days of Covid-19 lockdowns, user growth actually maintained the more elevated momentum we saw for most of 2023 during the last three months of the year.

Our analysis shows that social media user identities increased by 1.5 percent between October and December, thanks to an additional 75 million new users.

And these figures suggest that growth in the final quarter of 2023 was actually higher than the average for the year as a whole, with increases averaging 9.4 new users every second over those final three months of the year.