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How Much Time Do People Spend on Social Media?


Average Daily Time Spent on Social Media

Social media platforms are the applications and websites that allow people to share their pictures, videos, gifs, snaps, tweets, pins or simply text messages. These platforms are famous because they share content from one point to another, quickly, efficiently and in real-time.

Nowadays social media for people is synonymous to all the apps on their smartphones. But the fact is, social media started out as a communication tool through computers.

This ability to share opinions, pictures, events in real-time has completely transformed the way we live and the way we do business. So much so that we don’t realise how much time we end up spending on social media.

It starts slowly for fun and we don’t realise when it becomes an addiction. From using Facebook while we are standing in a grocery line to sending snaps on Snapchat while eating, social media has become an important part of our lives. We need Facebook to stay in touch without friends, we need Twitter to know the happenings in the world, Instagram to keep ourselves updated with others lifestyle and keep others updated of ours and then we need Snapchat to share some fleeting moments with the closest people in our circle, a day spent without social media feels like an empty, actionless day.

And in this age of digitisation, either we have become social media addicts or we are slowly becoming an addict by spending a lot of time in a day browsing on the different platforms.

However, have you ever wondered how much time you actually spend on social media? And what about other people who have the same demography as you?

How much time does a Person Spend on Social Media a day?

The amount of time that we dedicate to all the social media platforms is continuously increasing, with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Of all the time that we spend using the internet, thirty per cent is allocated to social media platforms.

Whereas, teens spend nine hours a day on one of the many social media platforms.

And while teens do take away the prize for being the most extreme social media users, the number of adults who use social media is moving upwards too. In 2005, only 5 per cent of Americans were regular social media users. Now, this figure has reached to more than 70 per cent. Impressive growth!

How much time does a person spend on social media a day?

The major reason for this continuous increase is the fact that Facebook is continually upgrading functions of all the four of its apps, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. All these apps make the cross-using easier even cross-post.

Out of all the time we spend being online, 60 per cent times we do it via mobile phones.

Social media platforms are further evolving to take this engagement on another level. They regularly keep adding more new features to attract more and more people and thus slowly increasing these digits.

Surprisingly, an average person spends approximately 116 minutes scrolling through social media feeds every day. This means, an average person spends 5 years and 4 months of their life doing nothing, but helping companies like Facebook and Instagram earning more and more revenue every day.

Further, this time is expected to increase even more in the coming years since the developers are making these apps more interactive. Notably, the development of these channels will drastically eat up the other traditional modes of advertisement, like TV and the newspapers are almost dead anyway.

Time Spent On Social Media in a Lifetime

How Much Time Do People Spend on Social Media

Currently, the average person spends about 7 years and 8 months of their lives watching TV. But now this time is decreasing, and decreasing drastically.

According to research, the time we spend on social media beats the time we spend in eating, socialising & drinking! Now, if we try to break down the time we spend on each platform then the numbers look different for different platforms.


The platform that is used the most is YouTube. An average person spends more than 40 minutes a day watching Youtube. This makes almost 1 year and 10 months of their lifetime.


Next comes, Facebook, unsurprisingly, an average human being will dedicate 35 minutes of their day scrolling through their Facebook feed. That makes it a 1 year and 7 months.


Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, comes third in the list. An average human being spending 25 minutes a day on Instagram.

Snapchat & Twitter

We spend 15 minutes on Snapchat every day and 1 minute on Twitter every day. That means 18 days in our entire life!

One of the major reasons why this trend is unhealthy is because the effect it puts on our health, and mental health at that, not even physical. Observe your phone using patterns, like most people, will realise that when you use your phone the most, you feel unhappy. You will feel more scattered and less productive, less centred and more reactive. And trust me, no one likes feeling that way. You feel it now too, you just don’t realise the reason.

There is plenty of research available on the web that supports this on a psychological level as well. When we scroll through our social media feeds, we pump a huge amount of dopamine into our system, the amount which isn’t healthy. And this much amount of dopamine becomes a lot for our brains to handle because the inevitable crash that follows afterwards.

Another negative thing about all this is the way we switch our attention from one task to another, from one device to another. Like, when you are working and you get an important email and then you receive a text for organising the drinks that night. The way we shift our attention from one device to another while making sense of everything in between isn’t healthy either.


Social media is such a necessary evil though. However, we can control its evilness by reducing the time we spend on it. Only invest that much amount of time that is needed and you will feel a lot better. A lot calmer and a lot in control, and this isn’t even a surprising thing!

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