Social Media Market Share

Real-time social media referrer statistics across Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok and more

NetMarketShare tracks social media market share worldwide based on referrer traffic to the open web, using real human visitor data with bots and fraudulent traffic filtered out so the numbers reflect actual users clicking through from social platforms.

What is social media market share?

Social media market share is the percentage of social-referred web traffic attributed to each social platform within a given time period. Unlike "monthly active users" reported by the platforms themselves, this measures something more actionable: which social networks are actually driving people out to the open web — the traffic that newsrooms, retailers, and publishers can monetize.

Social platforms we track

• Facebook — still one of the largest sources of social referral traffic to the open web
• X (Twitter) — high-velocity referral source for news and discussion
• Instagram — Meta's photo and video network
• TikTok — the fastest-growing source of social referral over the last few years
• YouTube — the world's largest video platform, also a major referrer
• LinkedIn — the dominant referrer for B2B and professional content
• Pinterest — outsized referrer for retail, recipes, and DIY content
• Reddit — community-driven referrer with strong long-tail traffic
• Snapchat, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr and other smaller social platforms

Why social-referrer share matters more than MAU

Platforms report their own monthly active user counts — numbers that mix passive scrollers, ad viewers, and people who never click out. Referrer-based market share measures something more useful: how much of the open web's traffic each platform actually generates. For publishers and marketers deciding where to invest content effort, the share that drives outbound clicks is the share that matters.

Related market share reports

• Search engine market share — the other major referral source
• Browser market share — how social traffic browses
• Mobile market share — most social traffic is mobile-first
• Operating system market share

How is social media market share measured?

NetMarketShare measures social media share from real visitor sessions across our partner network, counting which social platform referred each session, while filtering out bot traffic, datacenter traffic, and other non-human sources.

Read about our methodology · How we detect and remove invalid traffic