Published in partnership with Hootsuite and We Are Social, our new Digital 2022 global overview report reveals a ton of exciting new user milestones. For TikTok. For videos on Facebook and Instagram. For Telegram.
However, the most important trends are often hidden behind the headlines, so in this article we’ll go beyond the numbers and explore what people are actually doing online.
Dive in to learn more about your potential reach with social media ads across multiple platforms, social media as a news source, and more.
10 best takeaways
This video offers a handy overview of this year’s major headlines and trends.
The number of social media users grew by 227 million over the past year and reached 4.70 billion by early July 2022. The global social media user base has grown by over 5% in the past 12 months, with the latest global total now equivalent to 59.% of the world’s total population.
The number of social media and internet users indicates a slowdown in digital growth compared to the impressive growth we saw in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, current trends show that by this time next year, two-thirds of the world’s population should be online, and the number of social media users should reach the equivalent of 60% of the world’s population shortly thereafter.
As a result, it is safe to assume that we are now very close to – or perhaps have already reached – the inflection point of digital growth, and we should expect the growth curves to continue flattening from that point on.
But it is important to emphasize that this slowdown is inevitable; now that most of the world’s population is connected to the internet, it is statistically impossible for the number of users to continue to grow indefinitely at the rate we have seen in 2020 and 2021.
Moreover, the fact that we have reached this inflection point proves that connected technologies are now embedded in the lives of most people around the world.
Therefore, the key question is no longer whether our audience actually uses these technologies, but what they use them for and how we can take full advantage of the valuable – and ever-evolving – opportunities that these technologies provide.
Social networks are the main source of news
A more striking finding, from a Reuters Digital News report, is that people are now 2.5 times more likely to turn to social media for news than they are to regular newspapers and magazines.
Women especially turn to social platforms for news, with nearly six in 10 women surveyed saying they use social media and messengers to access and consume news content.
At first glance, these results are very different from recent GWI studies.
Just 34.8% of working-age internet users surveyed by GWI in the first quarter of 2022 said reading the news is one of the “top reasons”they use social media.
News is the driving force behind social use for people over 55.
As you might expect, young people are more likely to turn to social media for news than their parents’ generation.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents aged 18 to 24 said they use social media as a source of news, compared with less than half of respondents aged 55 and over.
While Reuters reports that younger people are more likely to consume news content via social media than older age groups, GWI data suggests that younger people’s consumption of social news may be more casual.
In other words, reading the news is not the main reason young people open their social media apps, but they still see and interact with news content on their social media feeds.
Conversely, although Reuters data shows that older age groups are less likely to use social media to get news than younger adults, news is actually a stronger driver of social media activity among these older adults.
Facebook is where people go for news
When it comes to the social media channels people use to get their news, Reuters reports that Facebook still dominates, with nearly half of all respondents citing the largest platform, Meta, as their news source.
YouTube comes second in this year’s rankings, with three out of ten respondents saying they consume news content on Alphabet’s main video platform.
However, it is worth emphasizing that men are more likely to use YouTube to get news than women.
WhatsApp ranks third in this year’s report, with 22% of respondents saying they use the most popular messaging platform, Meta, as a source of news content.
Meanwhile, the number of respondents who say they use TikTok to get their news has almost doubled from last year, from 4% in the 2021 Digital News report to 7% in this year’s study.
TikTok users spend 5% of their waking time on the app
There has been a lot of talk on social media in recent weeks about the amount of time people spend using social platforms, but unfortunately, some of the most frequently mentioned data has been misrepresented.
So, to help understand what’s really going on, our July Digital 2022 Global Statshot report includes two separate charts of time spent using social media apps: one uses data from data.ai to show average time per month, and the other uses data from data.ai to show average time per month. uses data from the Sensor Tower to show the average time per day.
In addition to displaying different metrics, note that the two datasets also cover different periods of user activity, so the numbers on one chart will not correlate with the numbers on the other.
Also, for clarity, please note that all numbers in this section – from both data.ai and Sensor Tower – are averages for users worldwide outside of mainland China.
Interestingly, each chart offers slightly different perspectives on social media behavior, but both offer extremely valuable points of view.
Data.ai’s analysis shows that the average global TikTok user outside of mainland China currently spends nearly a full day (23.6 hours) each month using the platform’s Android app, placing it at the top of the latest ranking.
For context, assuming the average person sleeps between seven and eight hours a day, these latest numbers show that TikTok users are now spending about 5% of their waking time watching TikTok videos.
However, YouTube is not far behind TikTok, with Android platform users spending an average of 23.2 hours per month using the YouTube app between January and March 2022.
However, it’s worth remembering that a significantly higher proportion of YouTube viewing will take place on laptops and desktops and connected TVs compared to TikTok.
As a result, there is a good chance that each individual viewer still spends more time watching YouTube videos across all devices than watching TikTok videos.
Also, the latest ad reach data shows that YouTube’s adult audience (18+) is about 2.5 times larger than TikTok’s adult audience, so total cumulative time spent on YouTube is likely more than twice as much as at TikTok.
Indeed, this hypothesis is supported by another set of data.ai results that show that YouTube records the highest amount of total cumulative time spent by all users across all mobile apps.
But this additional context doesn’t detract from TikTok’s achievement in reaching the top of the rankings for average monthly time spent per user.
It’s also important to highlight that the time users spend on the TikTok app is still growing rapidly, while the time users spend on the YouTube app has actually dropped slightly in recent months.
In comparison, in our Digital 2022 global overview report, we saw that users spent an average of 19.6 hours per month using the TikTok Android app throughout 2021, compared to 23.7 hours per month for users of the YouTube Android app.
So, the latest data shows that TikTok time per user increased by more than 20% in the first quarter compared to the full year 2021, while YouTube time per user decreased by just over 2%.
What’s more, as we’ll see later in this analysis, TikTok’s audience is also still growing, while YouTube has actually revised its audience numbers downward since our April update (although this revision is most likely due to ongoing sanctions in towards Russia).
Apart from the top two places, it’s interesting to see that Facebook is still in third place globally, averaging 19.4 hours per month per user.
But the conclusion that will likely worry Zuk and his team is that the data.ai data shows that the average Instagram user spends exactly half the time on Instagram that the average TikTok user spends on TikTok.
Instagram users still spend nearly half a day a month using the Android app, accounting for almost 2.5% of their waking hours.
Also, while the differences in total users mean we can’t just add up the values for each platform, these latest numbers show that people still spend more than two full days per month using the various Meta platforms.
More broadly, GWI reports that the typical social media user now spends 2 hours and 29 minutes a day on all social platforms, for a total of approximately 75.5 hours per month.
This means that we now spend more than three full days on social media every month, which is approximately 15% of our waking life.
Meanwhile, the Sensor Tower data on the time spent by the platform offers equally valuable insights.
They report that users who have the TikTok app installed on an Android phone spent an average of over 1.5 hours a day using the app between April and June 2022, significantly more than the time spent on the Android app any other social media platform.
This figure suggests that TikTok users now spend more than 2 days – 48 hours – per month using TikTok, which is even higher than the figure shown in data.ai’s Q1 analysis above.
For additional comparison, Sensor Tower reports that YouTube Android app users spent 74 minutes per day using the app in the second quarter, which is 22% less time than TikTok Android app users spent on the TikTok app during the same period.
Instagram ranked third in Sensor Tower’s latest analysis of daily time, with Android app users spending an average of 51 minutes per day using the app in Q2 2022.
But the statistic in the Sensor Tower data that is most likely to make headlines is that the typical Facebook user now spends roughly half the time using the Facebook Android app compared to the typical TikTok user who spends on the TikTok Android app.
As we’ll take a closer look at in the next section, the frequency with which people use each app can help explain the large differences between Facebook and Instagram results in data.ai data and Sensor Tower data.
However, on average, Sensor Tower reports that global Facebook users now spend 49 minutes a day using the Facebook for Android app, compared to 95 minutes that global TikTok users spend using the TikTok Android app.
However, it’s worth remembering that Facebook still has significantly more monthly active users than TikTok, so Facebook may still collect more total cumulative time than TikTok.
Other evidence suggests that parity between the two applications may only be a matter of time, as we will discuss in more detail in the next section.
TikTok ads now reach 1 billion adults every month
The latest data published by Bytedance Advertising Resources shows that TikTok ads now reach more than 1 billion people aged 18 and over.
For context, this means that TikTok ads now reach 22.9% of all adults outside of China each month.
TikTok continues to add new users at an impressive rate, with its global ad reach increasing by 52 million (+5.4%) in the last three months alone.
This is slightly lower than the figure we saw in last quarter’s report, but still means that TikTok is adding more than half a million new users every day.
However, it’s worth noting that TikTok has dropped to third place in data.ai’s latest app rankings for new downloads behind Instagram and Facebook.
CapCut allows more people to create TikTok videos
But data.ai’s ninth active user ranking tells an even more interesting story about the evolution of TikTok.
For context, CapCut is Byetdance’s free video editing software, and the mobile app appears to have been designed specifically to enable TikTok users to create even more compelling videos.
So the fact that so many people are using this app every month says that a significant number of people are creating – or at least trying to create – their own TikTok videos.
And this is of particular importance when we consider the role of TikTok in people’s lives.
Critically, the more content a user posts on a platform, the more “attached” to that platform they are likely to become.
Moreover, when users upload more content, the platform has more content to add to its feed, giving it more opportunities to engage users and serve ads.
But beyond the impact on TikTok, CapCut’s rising popularity may also indicate a change in people’s broader attitude towards creativity.
As data.ai analysts point out in their commentary on CapCut growth,
“Its presence in the top 10 is a reflection of the democratization of video production software. What used to be a professional skill has now become a hobby and a powerful engine of the new creator economy.”
But in contrast to these findings, GWI data shows that the consumption of funny and entertaining content remains the top activity on TikTok, with only 35.4% of working-age adults outside of China saying they post or share their content on the platform.
This compares to 42.7% of Snapchat users, 64.5% of Facebook users, and an impressive 70.2% of Instagram users.
However, for now, this lower publishing rate doesn’t seem like much of an issue for Bytedance.
A new study by Sensor Tower shows that TikTok is the second most used social media app, with only Instagram showing a higher app usage rate.
Sensor Tower analysis shows that approximately 3 out of 10 TikTok users using the Android platform app opened the app every day between April and June 2022.
In comparison, approximately 4 out of 10 Instagram users open Instagram every day, while for Facebook the figure is 27%.
Meanwhile, given TikTok’s emphasis on entertainment videos, it’s particularly interesting to note that only 1 in 5 YouTube users open the app every day.
However, it’s worth remembering that many people will watch YouTube videos through computers and connected TVs, as well as through the platform’s mobile apps, while TikTok usage is more likely to happen on the platform’s mobile apps.
No, Facebook is not dead.
Despite years of media headlines predicting Facebook’s demise, Meta’s latest ad reach data shows that stories of Facebook’s death are still grossly exaggerated.
The company’s own resources show that Facebook’s global ad reach actually increased by 1.2% between April and June, bringing the platform’s total global ad audience to 2.17 billion.
The platform’s overall user base also continues to grow, with the company ’s 2022 Q1 Investor Earnings report reporting a QoQ growth of 0.8% in monthly active users (MAU) Facebook and MAU reach).
Also, when Facebook’s age restrictions are taken into account and the fact that the platform remains ostensibly “blocked”in mainland China, Facebook’s latest data on MAU shows that almost six out of ten people (58.6%) on Earth who can use Facebook is already using it.
mysterious myth
Given these impressive numbers, it’s unclear why some media outlets continue to misrepresent Facebook’s health information.
This distortion of information is also not a new phenomenon; News headlines tell us that “Facebook is dying”for more than a decade.
Indeed, the New York Times headline proclaimed “Facebook Exodus”back in August 2009, when the platform had less than 350 million users.
Since then, Facebook’s user base has grown eightfold to nearly 2.6 billion additional users.
So my advice is wait until Zuck himself says it’s over before focusing too much on the bait.
Comparing the growth of TikTok and Facebook
However, there is more to this story than these headlines suggest.
For starters, Facebook’s recent growth rate is nowhere near as impressive as that of TikTok, whose ad audience has grown more than four times faster than Facebook’s over the past three months.
But while TikTok’s rapid ascent cannot be denied, it’s also important to put the platform’s growth figures in context.
Before we do that, it’s worth noting that Bytedance’s advertising tools only report ad reach data for audiences aged 18 and over, so to ensure a balanced comparison, we’ll focus on the same cohort for Facebook.
Bytedance also operates a separate platform for mainland China (Douyin), and while Facebook is technically still blocked in the country, it still reports some nominal ad reach in China, which is why we’ve removed Facebook users from mainland China from the following analysis.
With these caveats in mind, the data published in the tools of each respective platform shows that:
- Facebook ads reached 2.04 billion users aged 18 and over outside mainland China in July 2022.
- TikTok ads reached 1.02 billion users aged 18 and over outside mainland China in July 2022.
Admittedly, TikTok may well have more users under 18 than Facebook, but since Bytedance’s tools don’t publish reach data for users under 18, it’s hard to say for sure.
Either way, the main takeaway for marketers here is that Facebook ads still reach twice as many adults as TikTok ads.
Moreover, if both platforms maintain their current growth rates – which is unrealistic for both platforms, but especially for TikTok given the speed of its current rise – the data shows that TikTok’s ad reach will not catch up with Facebook’s ad reach at least another 4 years.
Measures that matter
But perhaps the most important takeaway when comparing the two platforms is that the majority of social media users outside of mainland China now use both Facebook and TikTok, as well as many other platforms.
Indeed, the “typical”global social media user currently actively uses almost seven and a half social media platforms each month.
What’s more, GWI data shows that a hefty 84% of TikTok users still use Facebook, while less than 0.05% of TikTok users — i.e. less than five out of every 10,000 — surveyed by GWI said they don’t use any other social media. platform.
Meanwhile, just over half of all working-age Facebook users also use TikTok, a finding that is in close agreement with the various numbers we examined above.
So maybe it’s time for marketers to stop pitting these platforms against each other.
Yes, there is still competition for people’s time and attention, and the more of these valuable resources a platform can attract, the higher the revenue potential of that platform.
However, this consideration probably matters more to investors than to marketers, especially since marketers only have to pay for ads when their content is actually shown to their chosen audience.
Of course, marketers still need to decide how to allocate their budgets across different social platforms, but all of the numbers above show that user count alone is a poor basis for such an allocation.
So, if you’re looking for more representative metrics on which to base allocation decisions, I would recommend:
- Cost Per Result: How much money will you need to spend on each platform to reach your audience and most importantly, achieve your desired goals? Given that we can now reach nearly all users of any given social media platform on at least one other social platform, it’s worth exploring which platforms offer the most cost-effective options to reach your target audience and achieve your desired results.
- Creative options: Different platforms offer different media formats, each with its own advantages and limitations. Because of this, it’s worth exploring what creative formats can offer the most effective and engaging ways to deliver your brand’s message, long before you start thinking about which platforms you’ll use to deliver that content.
- Context and motivations for use: Our audiences use different platforms for different reasons, and they are likely to be in different conditions, mindsets, and emotional states when they use each platform. Where and when will your brand message resonate most in your audience’s lives, and which platforms are most likely to fit in those contexts?
And no, kids don’t all leave Facebook either.
Continuing the story I covered in last quarter’s analysis, our July 2022 data may help dispel another common misconception about Facebook’s current momentum.
Contrary to more of the clickbait hoax, reach data doesn’t support the claim that “kids are leaving Facebook.”
In fact, Facebook’s latest global ad reach figures show that the teen audience is still growing, with the platform adding 1.35 million users between the ages of 13 and 19 between April and June 2022.
For reference, this equates to a quarterly growth of 0.6%.
Sure, it’s not as impressive as the growth we’d expect to see among this demographic on a platform like TikTok, but it’s growth nonetheless.
In other words, on a net change basis, kids are still joining Facebook, not leaving it.
Admittedly, teens currently make up a smaller percentage of the total Facebook audience, but that’s mainly because the number of users in older age groups, especially those over 50, has grown faster than the number of teen users in recent months..
By comparison, in July 2019, Facebook ads reached approximately 115 million Facebook users aged 13 to 17, representing 5.9% of the total Facebook ad audience.
At the time, Facebook reported ad reach of 194 million users aged 55 and over, representing 10% of the platform’s total audience.
Three years later, in July 2022, Facebook ad reach among people aged 13 to 17 grew to almost 121 million, but that demographic’s share of total Facebook ad reach dropped to 5.6%.
This is partly because Facebook ads currently reach 262 million users aged 55 and over, with this demographic currently accounting for 12.1% of the platform’s total ad reach.
Numbers versus feelings
But beyond the absolute number of users, it’s hard to deny that Facebook’s role in teens’ lives has dwindled significantly since the tumultuous days of the early 2010s.
For example, GWI reports that Facebook currently only ranks fifth among the “favorite”social networks of women aged 16 to 24, though Zuk and team will be happy to know that Instagram is still well ahead of that particular demographic.
Interestingly, Facebook performs better among Gen Z men, although the platform is still inferior to Instagram and WhatsApp.
However, Facebook is still the “favorite”choice for millennial men, ahead of WhatsApp.
Another important finding in this data is that 48.6% of all social media users worldwide, including in China, still choose one of the Meta platforms as their “favorite”.
Moreover, if we remove these users from mainland China, where all Meta platforms remain blocked, approximately two-thirds of social media users will name WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger as their favorite platform.
And what is very important, the Meta platforms still dominate among young users as well.
Globally (including China), 45.9% of female social media users aged 16 to 24 say one of the company’s four platforms is their favorite, while more than half (51.3%) of their male peers do either. same thing.
And if we remove users from mainland China, those numbers rise to 60.6% for female social media users aged 16 to 24 and 65.7% for male users in the same age group.
The number of Telegram users is growing rapidly
A recent company blog post shows that Telegram now has over 700 million monthly active users, suggesting that the platform has added approximately 200 million active users in the last 18 months alone.
The exact dates for the platform’s user milestones remain unclear, but this latest figure suggests that Telegram’s active user base is currently growing at around 25% year-on-year, or about 6% per quarter.
This means that Telegram could grow even faster than TikTok, whose adult ad audience has increased by 5.4% over the past 90 days.
Telegram’s impressive development trajectory is not only evident in its own data.
In Data.ai’s latest mobile app ranking, Telegram is in sixth place in terms of monthly active users, after TikTok, but ahead of Amazon and Twitter.
Meanwhile, data.ai’s latest ‘disruptive’ app ranking shows Telegram as second in quarterly monthly active user growth, ahead of all other social media platforms, including TikTok.
The Telegram app also continues to attract new users, with Sensor Tower reporting 28 million combined downloads worldwide through the Google Play Store and iOS App Store in June 2022 alone.
It’s not as high as some of its peers, although the number of downloads can be misleading.
By comparison, Sensor Tower data shows that in June 2022, TikTok had 52 million new downloads on the TikTok, TikTok Lite, and Douyin apps, while Instagram had 58 million new downloads on Instagram and Instagram Lite over the same period.
However, it is not clear how many of these new downloads represent actual “new”users, as opposed to existing users simply downloading the app on a new device.
Also, it’s hard to predict how many truly “new”downloads will turn into regular active users of each platform, so I’d advise caution when interpreting app download numbers.
The number of Snapchat users has also jumped
Meanwhile, Snapchat’s latest numbers are almost as impressive as Telegram’s.
According to data published in the company’s own tools, Snapchat’s advertising audience has grown by more than 100 million users since last year, corresponding to a 20% annual growth.
Snapchat ads currently reach almost 617 million users worldwide every month, which is roughly 10% of the “eligible”global audience aged 13 and over.
Snapchat is especially popular in the Middle East, as well as in Northern and Western Europe.
Drum usage is skyrocketing – on Facebook and Instagram
Data released by Meta Ads shows that Reels ads have reached significantly more users over the past 30 days than they did just three months ago.
For reference, in April 2022, Meta reported that Facebook Reels ads had reached 125.0 million users worldwide and Instagram Reels ads had reached 686.9 million users.
However, just 90 days later, those numbers look very different.
Meta tools show that Facebook Reels ads can now reach 473.5 million users and Instagram Reels ads can reach 754.8 million users.
By comparison, this means that Facebook Reels’ ad audience has grown by almost 350 million users in the past 3 months – a massive 279% increase.
Instagram Reels’ growth figures are somewhat less dramatic, but the format’s audience has grown by 68 million users (+9.9%) since April 2022.
Cannibalization risk?
However, the growth of Facebook Reels may have come at the expense of some of the other ad spaces on the platform.
For example, Meta’s own data shows that the number of users who saw ads on Facebook Instant Articles dropped by 8.4% over the last quarter, while the number of users who were shown ads on Marketplace fell nearly 5% since April.
But this shift could be part of the Meta’s plan.
For context, in a recent call with investors, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that Meta intends to prioritize activities that keep people in the Meta platform environment:
“We started by building world-class advertising tools to help companies reach potential customers and help people discover new products and services they might enjoy. But we’ve found that when [Shops & Marketplaces] ads link to external sites, you often end up on a web page that isn’t personalized or optimized, or where you need to re-enter your billing information. It’s not a good experience for people, and it doesn’t lead to better business outcomes. So our next phase is focused on building stores, marketplaces and business messaging on WhatsApp and Messenger to create more native commerce experiences in our apps.”
This could mean that Meta will start to de-emphasize Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shop ads that direct users to third-party sites in favor of creating more “platform”social commerce offerings.
However, despite this potential shift in focus, Instagram’s Shop tab ad reach has still jumped in the last 90 days.
In June 2022, in-store ads were shown to 276 million Instagram users, up from 197.4 million in March 2022, representing an impressive QoQ growth rate of nearly 40%.
Drum demographics
Returning to Reels, it is interesting to note that male users tend to over-index the ad audience of these formats.
Overall, 47.2% of Instagram’s advertising audience is female, while 52.8% is male.
However, if we focus on the Instagram Reels ad audience, the imbalance becomes more apparent: 44.3% of women versus 55.7% of men.
Similarly, while Facebook’s total ad audience is currently 43.3% female and 56.8% male, Facebook Reels’ audience is 37.8% female versus 62.2% male.
Our analysis suggests that this may be due to the fact that Indian users significantly re-index the audience of both formats.
For context, India has one of the largest gender imbalances in the world when it comes to social media use, with men making up a whopping three-quarters of the country’s Facebook and Instagram advertising audience.
Meanwhile, Indian users account for roughly a quarter of the global ad audience for both Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels in July 2022, so the country’s local gender bias is likely to play a disproportionate role in shaping Reels’ global audience gender profile.
Messengers are the medium
In addition to the impressive growth in Telegram users that we explored earlier in this article, there is more good news for messaging platforms in this quarter’s data.
The latest data.ai data shows that WhatsApp Business was one of the top 10 most downloaded mobile apps between April and June 2022, up three positions from its ranking in the first quarter.
This impressive result shows that Meta’s efforts to generate revenue from WhatsApp may be starting to pay off, eight years after the company paid $21.8 billion to acquire it.
Also, the evidence for this trend is not limited to data.ai research.
At its first “Conversations”messaging conference in May, Meta reported that:
“Every week, one billion people exchange messages with businesses on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct—whether it’s personal messages about brands, browsing product catalogs, asking for support, or interacting with stories.”
These numbers show that messaging apps represent a growing opportunity for social media companies and brands, and we expect to see an increase in messenger-related marketing activity around the world in the coming months.
Check out the latest data and insights on social media, the web, mobile and other digital technologies in the Digital 2021 report.
Important notes about changing data
Population Data: Earlier this month, the United Nations released a comprehensive update to its World Population Prospects data that included some important population changes around the world. In addition to affecting the numbers we report for the population, these changes may also affect all data points in which we report digital adoption or use as a percentage of the total population or as a percentage of a specific age group (for example, people age 13 and over). As a consequence, please note that any comparisons with equivalent data points published in previous reports in this series may result in unexpected changes or trends, including a potential decrease in user numbers.
Social Media Platforms: Both YouTube and Instagram also appear to have revised their baseline audience reach data since our previous report, which could cause some numbers for these platforms in the current report to be lower than the numbers we released. in previous reports. However, please be careful not to interpret any such changes as an actual reduction in user numbers or audience reach, as these changes may be the result of changes in methodology or definitions.
To learn more about changes that may affect the comparability of data in the Global Digital Reports series, see our detailed data notes.