Most popular social media sites in Spain 2018

In the digital age, social media play an essential role in today’s society and our everyday life to share ideas, information, interests or simply to communicate with other people. The widely known American video-sharing website YouTube was the most visited media site in Spain in 2018, with 89 percent of internet users taking part in a survey reporting to have used this platform. The Facebook-owned WhatsApp ranked second on the list, with data pointing at a usage of 87 percent of Spanish media users.

The most popular social media applications

The instant messaging platform WhatsApp was one of the most downloaded communication apps on Google Play in the world in 2019, with over 74.5 million downloads. Facebook Messenger, another communication app, clocked up approximately 55.7 million downloads, ranking this platform second on the global list. In Spain, the social media application that registered most downloads as of May 2019 was F3, a platform on which users can ask or answer other users’ questions, making them both the interviewer and the interviewee. Snapchat was the second most downloaded social app in Spain, with around 646 thousand downloads in May 2019.

The rise of mobile communication

Mobile telephony has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. The number of cellphones is projected to reach 13.09 billion devices worldwide in 2019, and it is only expected to grow more over the next years. The global smartphone penetration is forecast to hit over 50 percent in 2019, meaning that more than half of the world’s population owns or has owned this type of mobile device. This might also be related to the fact that smartphones have become more affordable over the recent years, with the average smartphone costing around 324 U.S. dollars in 2017.