Digital 2023: Revisions to social media user figures
In a number of our Digital 2023 local country reports, the figures for social media use may seem meaningfully lower than the equivalent values that we published in previous years.
However, these changes are the result of revisions in the source data that we use to inform our figures, and they do not represent an actual decline in social media use.
Indeed, there is nothing in data published by trusted third parties like GWI and data.ai to signal any drop in social media use around the world.
Rather, the differences in this year’s numbers are the result of widespread “corrections” in the data published by social media platforms.
For context, we rely on the latest advertising audience reach data published by a variety of the world’s top platforms to inform our figures for overall social media use in each country or region.
However, because Facebook and YouTube are typically the largest social media platforms in each country outside of China, the ad reach numbers published by these companies play the biggest role in shaping our overall social media user figures.
Both of these platforms made important revisions to their published advertising audience reach data in the final weeks of 2022, but Meta’s revisions have had the most widespread impact, so you may want to read this article to learn more about the company’s most recent round of changes.
Note that we use a different set of data “signals” to inform our global figure for social media use though, so the issues highlighted here have not impacted our global figure.
So, the key takeaway is that social media users have not declined.
To reiterate, any drops in the social media user numbers in our Digital 2023 reports compared with the figures that we published in previous years are the result of source data corrections, and they do not signal any change in people’s actual social media behaviours.
Please do note that this means the social media user numbers in this year’s reports are not comparable with those published in our previous reports though, and any comparisons between years will deliver inaccurate results and incorrect trends.
And just in case you were wondering: no, social media is not dying, and nor is Facebook.