Average Time Spent On Social Media in 2023 (by Platform)
There’s no question that social media marketing is one of the most popular ways to grow a business. The numbers say it all: there are 4.89 billion social media users worldwide in 2023, and in the US alone, as many as 82% of the population use social media.
But to really understand how and where to market your products, you not only need to know what the most popular social media platforms are, but you also need to understand exactly how consumers are distributing their time amongst them.
So just what’s the average time spent on social media per day and how does it vary according to each platform?
Time spent on social media: top platforms
According to the latest data on time spent on social media, US adults spend the most time on TikTok. On average, they spend 55.8 minutes a day on the platform in 2023.
This is impressive, considering TikTok was only launched in the US in 2017. Time spent on TikTok has increased over the past few years, and, in doing so, the platform has overtaken its competitors one by one. In 2019, it surpassed Instagram, only to do the same to Facebook the following year. In 2022, TikTok surpassed YouTube for the very first time. The video-sharing platform comes in second this year at 47.5 minutes per day.
At 34.1 minutes, the platform on which US social media users spend the third most amount of time is Twitter. This is followed by Snapchat, with users spending an average of 30.8 minutes a day on the platform. Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, come in fifth and sixth at just over half an hour (30.6 minutes and 30.2 minutes, respectively), and Reddit rounds out the six platforms US social media users spend the most time on per day at 23.6 minutes.
COVID-19 boost to average time spent on social media
The average time spent on social media by US users has actually been increasing over the past few years.
This is due to the boom that resulted from the coronavirus pandemic. With lockdowns being implemented across the country, consumers were forced to stay home. To keep themselves entertained, many turned to social media.
For instance, TikTok witnessed an 85.3% annual surge in its total number of users in October 2020. Facebook’s annual user growth rate also rose to 8.7% that same year—the largest growth that’s expected between 2019 and 2024.