Brands on social media statistics & facts

Why social media matters to brands

Social media has become the place where most brands meet most of their customers. It is where people discover new products, check what others say about them, ask for help when something goes wrong and, more and more often, buy without ever leaving the app. For a large share of consumers, the social feed has replaced the television break, the shop window and the call centre at the same time. That is why brands of every size, from global consumer goods companies to local cafes, now treat their presence on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and other networks as a core part of how they sell and how they are seen.

The numbers behind this shift are large. There were 5.66 billion social media user identities worldwide in October 2025, equal to 68.7 percent of the world population. Meta alone earned 196.2 billion dollars from advertising in 2025, almost all of it from businesses trying to reach people on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. More than 30 percent of adult internet users say they discover new brands, products and services through ads on social platforms, and among people aged 16 to 34 social media ads are the leading source of brand discovery.

At the same time, being on social media has become harder for brands to do well. Organic reach is limited, engagement rates on most platforms are falling, consumers are quick to call out content that feels forced, and they expect fast replies when they reach out. This report brings together the latest data on how consumers use social media to find and judge brands, how much companies spend to reach them, how brand content performs on each platform, and how customer service, commerce, influencers and artificial intelligence are changing the rules.

The audience: billions of users, hours every week

The potential audience for brands on social media now covers most of the adult population of the world. According to the Digital 2026 report published by DataReportal, the number of social media user identities reached 5.66 billion in October 2025, up 259 million, or 4.8 percent, in a year. That works out at about 21.5 million new user identities every month. Our data on the number of social network users worldwide tracks how this total has grown over the past decade.

People also spend a great deal of time on these platforms. The typical online adult spends about 18 hours and 36 minutes a week on social media and video feeds, and women aged 16 to 24 spend 25 hours and 45 minutes. The average user is active on 6.75 different platforms each month, which means that brands rarely have one single place to reach their audience; they need to be present on several networks at once, each with its own format and culture. More detail is available in our figures on daily social media usage worldwide.

Most of that time is not spent looking for brands. The most common reason for using social media is keeping in touch with friends and family, cited by 50.2 percent of users, followed by filling spare time at 39.7 percent and reading news stories at 35.4 percent. Brands are guests in a space that people mainly use for other things, which explains why content that entertains, informs or helps tends to perform better than straightforward advertising. The full ranking is shown in our report on why people use social media.

How consumers discover and research brands on social

Social media has become one of the most important channels for finding and checking out brands. DataReportal says social networks are the second most important channel overall for online brand research, after search engines, and they rank first among internet users aged 16 to 34. For younger consumers, scrolling through Instagram, TikTok or YouTube is often the first step in deciding what to buy, before any search engine is used.

The platforms differ in how strongly they are used for this purpose. Instagram leads: 62.8 percent of its active users say they use it to follow or research brands and products. TikTok follows with 56.2 percent and Facebook with 53 percent. Because Instagram also has a very large user base, it reaches the largest absolute audience of brand researchers of any platform, ahead of Facebook and then TikTok, even though TikTok has a higher share of users researching brands than Facebook.

Instagram leads for brand research: 62.8 percent of Instagram users follow or research brands and products on the platform, ahead of TikTok at 56.2 percent and Facebook at 53 percent.

Paid social also plays a big role in discovery. More than 30 percent of adult internet users say they find new brands, products and services through ads on social media, putting social ads third among brand discovery channels, behind search engines and television ads. Together, those three channels reach only 62.2 percent of online adults, a reminder that no single channel reaches everyone and that brands need a mix of approaches.

Discovery through social is also growing on newer platforms. The share of TikTok users who use the app to follow or find information about brands and products has risen sharply since late 2021, according to GWI, and the same trend is visible on Snapchat. Short video has turned product discovery into entertainment: people come across products in creator videos, comment threads and live streams rather than in traditional ads, and the line between content and commerce is increasingly hard to see.

Where consumers who follow brands are active

For brands, the choice of platform depends on where their audience spends time. The Sprout Social Index 2025, based on a survey of 4,044 consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia who follow at least five brands on social media, shows how broad that presence has become. Facebook remains the most common platform, with 90 percent of these consumers holding a profile, followed by Instagram at 82 percent and YouTube at 76 percent. TikTok reached 58 percent, X 50 percent and Snapchat 46 percent.

Facebook still the widest net: 90 percent of consumers who follow brands have a Facebook profile, compared with 82 percent on Instagram and 58 percent on TikTok.

The gap between the older and newer networks is narrowing among younger consumers, who are more likely to use TikTok and Snapchat and less likely to use Facebook. This is why most brands now run accounts on several networks and adapt their content for each one: longer posts and community groups on Facebook, polished visuals and Reels on Instagram, fast and informal short videos on TikTok, and longer tutorials and reviews on YouTube. Our overviews of Instagram, Facebook and YouTube show how each audience differs, and our ranking of the biggest social media platforms by users puts their size in context.

The accounts with the largest audiences show what brand success on social media looks like at the top end. Football clubs, sports stars, media brands and luxury houses dominate the lists of the most followed accounts, while consumer brands such as Nike and National Geographic have built audiences in the hundreds of millions. See our data on the most followed Instagram accounts and the most followed TikTok accounts for the current rankings.

How much brands spend to reach social audiences

Organic posts are only part of the picture. Most brands also pay to reach people on social media, and social advertising is now the largest single channel in global advertising. WPP Media, in its midyear 2026 forecast, expects global advertising revenue to grow 8.9 percent in 2026 to about 1.3 trillion dollars, and describes social as the largest channel, although it expects growth in social to slow to single digits from 2027. Dentsu forecasts that social advertising will grow 11.4 percent in 2026, one of the fastest rates of any channel. More detail is available in our data on social media ad spend worldwide.

The clearest measure of how much brands spend on social media comes from the platforms themselves. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, earned 196.2 billion dollars from advertising in 2025, up from 160.6 billion in 2024 and 131.9 billion in 2023. Advertising revenue has grown by more than 70 percent since 2022, when Meta was hit by changes to Apple privacy rules that made ads harder to target and measure.

Record ad haul: Meta advertising revenue rose from 113.6 billion dollars in 2022 to 196.2 billion in 2025, as brands poured more money into Facebook and Instagram.

Growth accelerated further in 2026. In the second quarter of 2026, Meta advertising revenue rose 27 percent to 59.4 billion dollars. The number of ad impressions increased 14 percent and the average price per ad rose 12 percent, showing that brands are paying more for each placement as well as buying more of them. Meta says 3.60 billion people used at least one of its apps every day in June 2026. Our figures on Facebook average advertising revenue per user show how much each user is worth to the company.

Advertising revenue across social platforms

Meta dominates the social advertising market, but it is not alone. YouTube earned 40.4 billion dollars from advertising in 2025, up about 12 percent. Among the smaller listed platforms, Snap reported revenue of 5.9 billion dollars, Pinterest 4.2 billion and Reddit 2.2 billion, all of them mostly from advertising. TikTok does not publish its financial results, so it is not included. The gap between Meta and the rest shows how concentrated brand spending on social media has become. For a wider comparison, see our data on revenue of selected social media companies.

Meta in a league of its own: Meta earned 196.2 billion dollars from ads in 2025, almost five times the 40.4 billion earned by YouTube ads and far ahead of Snap, Pinterest and Reddit.

For brands, the smaller platforms can still be valuable. Pinterest reached 619 million monthly active users at the end of 2025 and is used heavily for planning purchases, from home decoration to fashion. Snap had 946 million monthly active users and says the number of its active advertisers rose 28 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. Reddit, with its topic-based communities, gives brands access to people who are actively discussing products and asking for recommendations. These platforms usually offer lower ad prices than Meta, and their audiences can be easier to reach for specialist brands.

How brand content performs: engagement benchmarks

Posting on social media is easy; getting people to respond is not. The 2026 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report from Quid, formerly Rival IQ, analysed millions of posts from 150 randomly selected companies in each of 18 industries. It measures engagement rate per post as likes, comments and other interactions divided by the number of followers, which allows brands of different sizes to be compared.

TikTok is again the clear leader. The median brand post on TikTok achieved an engagement rate of 2.01 percent in the 2026 report, several times higher than on any other platform. Instagram engagement continued a slow decline, falling from 0.36 percent to 0.30 percent, a drop of about 17 percent in a year. YouTube appeared in the report for the first time with a median of 0.21 percent. X engagement doubled from 0.015 percent to 0.03 percent, but from a very low base. Facebook engagement held steady year on year and remains among the lowest of the major platforms.

TikTok leads by a wide margin: the median brand post on TikTok earned an engagement rate of 2.01 percent, compared with 0.30 percent on Instagram and 0.21 percent on YouTube.

Engagement varies a great deal by industry. On TikTok, pharmaceutical brands, higher education institutions, alcohol brands and energy companies achieved the highest engagement rates. On Instagram, higher education, sports teams and energy brands led, while on Facebook sports teams came first, followed by higher education and energy. On X, sports teams, automotive brands, airlines and influencers performed best, and on YouTube food brands had the highest engagement, followed by pet brands and sports. The common factor is an audience that is emotionally invested: fans, students and enthusiasts engage far more than casual followers.

Low engagement rates do not mean that social media does not work for brands. Many posts are seen by far more people than engage with them, and paid campaigns are measured on reach, clicks and sales rather than likes. But the falling engagement on established platforms explains why brands are shifting effort towards short video, creators and communities, where people are more likely to respond.

How often brands post

The same benchmark shows how often brands post on each platform. The median brand published 3.69 posts a week on Instagram and 3.0 on Facebook in the 2026 report. On X, the median was 2.24 posts a week, and on TikTok, where each post is a video that takes more time to produce, it was 1.98 videos a week.

More is not always better: brands post most often on Instagram, at 3.69 posts a week, but TikTok, where they post just under twice a week, delivers by far the highest engagement.

The data suggest that posting more does not guarantee better results. Higher education institutions, which lead on engagement across several platforms, often post less than the median, while some industries that post heavily see low engagement. The platforms reward content that keeps people watching and interacting, so brands increasingly focus on fewer, better posts and on formats such as short video, carousels and live streams that the algorithms favour.

What consumers want from brand content

Consumers have clear views about how brands should behave on social media. In the Sprout Social Index 2025, 93 percent of consumers said it is important for brands to keep up with online culture. But they also draw a line between understanding culture and chasing it: 33 percent said that brands jumping on viral trends is embarrassing, and 27 percent said trends only work for brands within 24 to 48 hours. Being relevant, in other words, means knowing the audience rather than copying every meme.

Tone matters too. In a Sprout Social survey of 2,250 consumers in August 2026, 50 percent said they want brands to sound authentic and relatable rather than corporate, and 84 percent said cultural relevance is important. When asked what drives their loyalty, 44 percent pointed to the quality of the product or service and 33 percent to the originality of the content. Sprout Social says its 2026 content strategy research, based on more than 2,300 consumers and 1,200 marketers, found that consumers want brands to make human-generated content their top priority, a clear signal of unease about the rise of AI-generated posts.

Trust is a growing concern. In the 2025 Index, 93 percent of consumers said brands need to do more to combat misinformation, and in the August 2026 survey 84 percent said they are concerned about AI deepfakes, while 38 percent said they have become more sceptical of ads in general. Brands that are transparent about who they are, what they sell and how their content is made are better placed to keep that trust.

From scrolling to buying

Social media is no longer just a place to build awareness; it is increasingly where people buy. In the Sprout Social Index 2025, 81 percent of consumers said social media drives impulse purchases. When asked where they make purchases directly through social media, 39 percent named Facebook, 36 percent TikTok and 29 percent Instagram. Among younger consumers TikTok is especially strong: 54 percent of Gen Z and 47 percent of millennials said they make purchases on the platform.

Seasonal shopping shows the same pattern. In the August 2026 Sprout Social survey, 46 percent of consumers said they discover gifts through social media, the same share as physical stores and ahead of recommendations from friends and family at 34 percent. The share rose to 54 percent among Gen Z and 50 percent among millennials, compared with 31 percent among baby boomers, who still prefer stores. Nearly half of consumers, 49 percent, said they are more likely to buy from brands that start their holiday campaigns early, in August.

The growth of in-app shops such as TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping and Facebook Marketplace has shortened the path from discovery to purchase to a few taps. For brands, that turns social media into a direct sales channel with its own economics: product listings, affiliate commissions for creators, live shopping events and ads that link straight to checkout. It also makes results easier to measure, which is one reason advertising budgets have continued to move towards social platforms.

Social media as a customer service channel

Consumers increasingly expect to reach brands on social media when they have a question or a problem, and they expect quick answers. In the Sprout Social Index 2025, 73 percent of consumers said they would buy from a competitor if a brand does not respond to them on social media. That makes customer care on social not just a service function but a direct factor in keeping customers.

The August 2026 Sprout Social survey shows where consumers go for help. TikTok was named by 50 percent of respondents as a platform they use first for customer service, followed by Facebook at 46 percent, Instagram at 44 percent, X at 28 percent and WhatsApp at 26 percent. Most people prefer to handle problems privately: 55 percent prefer direct messages to public complaints, while 31 percent comment publicly and 13 percent tag brands directly. A third, 33 percent, want brands to move public complaints into private messages to resolve them.

TikTok becomes a help desk: half of consumers named TikTok as a first stop for customer service, ahead of Facebook at 46 percent and Instagram at 44 percent.

Speed matters. In the same survey, 68 percent of consumers said they expect a brand to respond within 24 hours, 24 percent expect a reply within one to two hours and 14 percent expect a response in less than an hour. For large brands receiving thousands of messages a day, meeting those expectations requires dedicated teams, clear escalation rules and, increasingly, AI tools that sort and draft replies for human agents. A further 27 percent of consumers said they plan to use social media for customer service more than in the previous year, while 59 percent expect to use it about as much.

Brands and creators

Working with creators has become one of the main ways brands reach people on social media. Influencer Marketing Hub, in its 2026 benchmark report based on more than 600 respondents, found that 87.5 percent of brands and agencies expect their influencer marketing budgets to increase, and 72.2 percent expect increases of 50 percent or more. Only 5.6 percent expect budgets to fall. TikTok was the platform most often included in influencer plans, chosen by 31 percent of respondents, followed by Instagram and YouTube.

Most brands now run these programmes themselves: 66.3 percent manage influencer marketing entirely in-house, while about 10.7 percent work only through agencies and a similar share use a mix of the two. Brand awareness remains the main goal, named by 89 percent of those increasing budgets, while 35 percent prioritise conversions and 25 percent attributable revenue. Sprout Social says 49 percent of consumers make purchases at least once a month because of content from influencers, a figure that explains why creator content is taking a growing share of social budgets.

Creators bring something brand accounts often struggle to achieve: trust and a sense of personal recommendation. GWI data show that 41 percent of people who follow influencers researched a product after seeing it on social media because it matched something they needed, compared with 30 percent of the average consumer. For brands, the challenge is to choose creators whose audiences match their customers and to measure results beyond likes and views.

Artificial intelligence and brand social media

Generative AI has quickly become part of everyday social media work. In the 2026 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Social Media Examiner, 62 percent of marketers said they use generative AI tools every day. In the Sprout Social Index 2025, 93 percent of social media practitioners said AI can help them fight creative fatigue, 48 percent of marketing leaders planned to increase AI investment in 2025 and 97 percent said AI knowledge is critical for their teams. Our data on the benefits of generative AI in social media marketing show where marketers see the greatest gains.

Brands mostly use AI to draft captions and posts, brainstorm ideas, resize and edit images and video, analyse performance and sort customer messages. In influencer marketing, 36.7 percent of respondents to the Influencer Marketing Hub survey use AI to find creators and 21.1 percent use it to generate content, while 10.6 percent do not use AI at all. Platforms are also building AI into their ad systems: Meta and others now let brands generate ad variations, target audiences and set budgets automatically.

Consumers are more cautious. With 84 percent worried about deepfakes and many saying they want human-made content, brands face a balancing act between using AI to work faster and keeping their content authentic. Labelling is one response: platforms such as Meta, TikTok and YouTube now label content made or edited with AI, and many marketers support these labels, as shown in our data on what marketers think of AI-generated content labels.

How marketers are planning their social strategy

Marketers continue to shift effort towards video and towards platforms that deliver results. In the 2026 Social Media Examiner report, 49 percent of marketers said video is the single most important type of content, and 56 percent planned to increase their organic activity on Instagram. Sprout Social says 70 percent of marketers in its 2026 research named Facebook as the platform with the strongest business impact, a reminder that the oldest network still delivers for many brands despite its low engagement rates. Our data on the platforms marketers use, the platforms with the highest return on investment and how marketers plan to use each platform show these choices in more detail.

Proving value remains a challenge. In the Sprout Social Index 2025, 65 percent of marketing leaders said they want a direct link between social campaigns and business goals, 52 percent want quantifiable cost savings across channels and 45 percent want better data visualisation. Only 57 percent of leaders said their executives trust the social team, even though 74 percent of executives said they do. Better measurement, linking posts and ads to sales, sign-ups and customer retention, is the main way social teams are trying to close that gap.

Social teams are also under pressure. In the same Index, 94 percent of practitioners said they feel pressure to be chronically online, and more than a third reported rising creative fatigue. At the same time, 86 percent of leaders expected to hire more people for their social teams. The job has grown from posting updates into a mix of content production, community management, customer service, commerce and data analysis, and teams are being reshaped to match.

The outlook for brands on social media

Social media will remain the most important channel for many brands over the next few years, but the way brands use it is changing. Budgets are still growing, with Meta advertising revenue up 27 percent in the second quarter of 2026, but forecasters expect overall growth in social advertising to slow as time spent on the platforms plateaus and AI assistants compete for attention. At the same time, the platforms are becoming stores, search engines and help desks as well as places to share content.

The brands that succeed are likely to be those that treat social media as a relationship rather than a broadcast channel: responding quickly to customers, working with trusted creators, investing in video and community, and using AI carefully without losing a human voice. Consumers have made clear what they want, and the data show that brands which ignore them risk losing customers to competitors who listen. For a wider view of the industry, see our social media statistics and facts overview.

Brands on social media in numbers

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