U.S. market share of leading social media websites 2021

In May 2021, Facebook accounted for nearly 71.8 percent of all social media site visits in the United States, confirming its position as the leading social media website by far. Other social media platforms, despite their popularity, had to make do with smaller shares of visits across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices combined: image sharing social network Pinterest ranked second with 12.4 percent of all U.S. social media site visits, while microblogging platform Twitter accounted to 9.15 percent of the total visits in the country. As of January 2021, the United States hosted the second-largest Facebook audience worldwide, with 190 million people subscribed to the platform.

Facebook: mobile vs desktop usage

At the beginning of 2021, 81 percent of Facebook users across the globe were using the platform’s social networking services exclusively via mobile phone, while only 1.7 percent reported using their desktop or laptop devices. In May 2021, three Facebook Inc products occupied the leading positions as most downloaded social networking apps on the Apple App Store in the United States. Facebook’s social media platform ranked first with 2.7 million downloads, while Facebook-owned instant-messaging services Messenger and WhatsApp followed with 2.3 million and 1.3 million downloads respectively.

Social media evolution

Between 2012 and 2020, the daily time spent on social networks worldwide experienced a constant increase, with users reaching an average of 145 minutes per day in 2019 and maintaining the same engagement levels throughout 2020. However, users’ favorite platforms have changed since 2019, and the power balance appears to be shifting further from Facebook’s market dominance. Not only Facebook’s user growth rate is estimated to slow down in the next years, but users belonging to Generation Z appear to prefer video-first social platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.