Not many influencers. WhatsApp and Facebook dominate the social media landscape in middle-income nations

Report Issue

Please complete the required fields.

Your Name

Email

Reason (required)
This post contains broken linksPost has incorrect informationPost has spamCopyright IssueOther

Description

Submit

In just a few decades, social media has changed how people around the world interact and communicate. And in eight middle-income countries surveyed by Pew Research Center in 2023, two particular platforms – WhatsApp and Facebook – dominate the social media scene.

Across these eight countries in Latin America, Africa and South Asia, a median of 73% of adults say they use WhatsApp and 62% say they use Facebook. Considerably fewer people say they use TikTok (median of 36%), Instagram (29%), Twitter (20%) or Telegram (15%). The surveys were conducted in Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa in 2023, before Twitter was renamed X.

WhatsApp, in particular, stands out for its broad reach in middle-income countries. In all eight surveyed countries, at least half of adults use WhatsApp, with shares ranging from a low of 50% in India to a high of 90% in Brazil. In the United States, by comparison, only 29% of adults use WhatsApp.

But Facebook is more popular in the U.S. than it is in some of these middle-income nations. Around two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) use Facebook, compared with smaller shares in Kenya (62%), South Africa (61%), Nigeria (56%), Indonesia (53%) and India (39%).

Use of TikTok and Twitter is generally similar in the U.S. and in the middle-income countries we surveyed. For example, a third of U.S. adults use TikTok, similar to the median of 36% across the eight middle-income countries. Even in India – where TikTok is officially banned – 13% of adults say they use the platform.

We did not ask about Telegram use in the U.S. and, conversely, we did not ask about YouTube – the most popular social media site in the U.S. – in the middle-income countries surveyed.