Social Media Marketing Statistics to Guide Your Content Strategy

Posted in AI Content Creation on February 7, 2025
By

Ashwini Pai

A social media strategy that accounts for real-world engagement behaviors has a better chance of hitting sales targets. When developing strategy, getting the numbers and facts straight should be the first order of business. The actual data is important; you can’t rely on intuition and observation alone. This compilation of social media marketing statistics from online resources is meant to help enhance your content strategy with data-driven precision. Also included is a brief discussion on using Narrato AI social media post generator to speed up content ideation and creation.

Statistics on social media usage
Best performing content on social media
Content strategies should make room for influencer marketing
Create engaging social media posts within seconds

Statistics on social media usage

For a majority of people, social media is a means to keep in touch with friends and family. Finding products to purchase and seeing content from their favorite brands figure in the top ten uses of social media. What’s interesting to note is that Gen Alpha (born between 2010-2025) is increasingly using social media to find the things they want to buy. As this EMARKETER article discusses, children begin shaping household purchasing decisions as early as age 5, with 85% of parents reporting that their 5-9 year olds request products they spot while shopping. Beyond in-store influences, children’s exposure to television commercials and digital advertising also significantly drives purchase requests.

Here are more statistics on the influence of social media on purchase decisions and the most bankable social media platforms for marketers:

Nearly 64% of the world’s population are social media users.
The typical internet user spends almost two and a half hours daily using social media sites. TikTok has the highest average time per user while YouTube has the greatest overall share of total social media time.
The average person uses 6.7 different social networks per month.
37.9% of survey participants reported making a purchase after viewing a social media advertisement.
76% of U.S. adults are reachable through Facebook ads.
75% of Instagram users engage with an ad by taking action.
Over half of consumers in a survey said they research real user photos or videos before buying. Encouraging social feedback boosts engagement and helps generate user content, especially for trending or well-received products.
Most popular social media platforms: Meta (Facebook) is at the top with over 3 billion monthly active users, with WhatsApp playing catch-up with about the same number. YouTube (over 2.5 billion active monthly users), TikTok (over 2.1 billion users), Instagram (2 billion active monthly users), LinkedIn (over 1 billion members), and X (~650 million active users), are the top social media platforms.
In a 2024 Statista survey, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn were identified as the most popular social media platforms for marketing purposes.

Source: Statista

In the U.S., social media marketers mainly target Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as the leading platforms for reaching a broad audience. As far as Latam is concerned, Instagram is the most popular platform in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, while Facebook dominates Columbia, Mexico, and Peru.
American marketers focus on platforms like WeChat, Weibo, Douyin (TikTok), Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili, as they dominate the Chinese market. A 2023 survey found that 1 in 5 Chinese respondents discover new brands and products through social media comments or advertisements. Chinese consumers are especially receptive to social media ads, particularly when they feature attractive deals or relevant content.

These statistics underscore the importance of a multi-platform social media strategy, with market expansions, emergence of new consumer segments, and consumer agency, choice, and access in mind. An advanced social media plan will focus on maintaining a consistent presence on platforms offering the highest value, and assign greater or lesser weight to each to drive greater reach and achieve better results.

Best performing content on social media

Content preferences differ on different social media platforms. A strong content strategy considers social media marketing statistics on the best-performing content types on top platforms.

What types of content attract the highest engagement on Instagram?

Carousels remain the most engaging content type despite a 15% YoY decline, with an average 0.55% engagement rate per post.
Reels have a 0.50% engagement rate, while images average 0.45%.
Images generate the most comments for large profiles (100K+ followers), but Reels drive more conversations for smaller pages.
Carousels receive the most saves, while Reels boost impressions for small-to-mid-sized accounts (under 50K followers).
Small accounts (under 5K followers) have a 20% view rate on Reels, averaging 300 views per video, while large profiles (100K+ followers) get 15K views per Reel.
Brands post an average of 20 times per month, with 50% being image posts.
Smallest accounts see the highest YoY growth rate at 38% on average.

(Source: Socialinsider)

What types of content receive the highest engagement on Facebook?

Albums are the most engaging post type on Facebook
- Albums have the highest engagement rate on Facebook.
- They act as mini-stories, keeping users engaged longer.
- Ideal for product features, event highlights, or themed collections.
- Smaller profiles benefit the most, as their audiences feel a personal connection.
- Larger profiles tend to get more shares from videos.
Smaller profiles have the highest engagement rates
- Accounts with fewer than 5K followers see higher engagement (around 0.30%).
- Their close-knit audiences lead to more likes, comments, and shares.
- A smaller following can still make a big impact with meaningful connections.
Status posts receive the most comments
- Text-based status posts generate more comments than other content types.
- They invite discussions by encouraging followers to share opinions and ideas.
- Great for posing questions, sharing thoughts, or tapping into trending topics.
- Comments signal deeper engagement, making status posts valuable.

(Source: Socialinsider)

What types of content get the highest engagement on LinkedIn?

Multi-image posts receive the highest likes and comments
- These posts drive the most engagement, especially for large profiles.
- Ideal for increasing interaction and fostering discussions.
Videos are the most shared content type
- While not the most engaging, videos get the highest number of shares.
- More shares lead to more impressions and greater brand visibility.
- Particularly effective for profiles with over 100K followers.
Polls generate the highest impression rate
- Polls outperform all other post types in visibility.
- Impressions on LinkedIn have reached an average of 9.50% in 2024.
- Their interactive nature makes them highly effective for reaching a wider audience.

(Source: Socialinsider)

Content strategies should make room for influencer marketing

When they need help making purchase decisions, consumers trust family, friends, and influencers more than brands and celebrity ambassadors. Check out how and why influencer marketing is increasingly becoming important to brands’ social media strategies.

Half of marketers use influencer marketing
- In 2023, 50% of marketers worked with influencers.
- B2C brands and agencies collaborate with influencers more than B2B brands.
Ecommerce brands dominate influencer marketing
- 57.6% of brands working with influencers run ecommerce stores.
- Ecommerce businesses benefit from influencer marketing due to global accessibility.
Influencer content often outperforms branded content
- 36% of brands say influencer content is more effective than brand-created content.
- 84.8% of marketers find influencer marketing effective.
- Influencers build trust that brands struggle to achieve on their own.
Gen Z prefers influencer recommendations over celebrities
- 45% of European Gen Z consumers are more likely to buy fashion items seen on influencers rather than celebrities or peers.
- India’s Gen Z is 50% more likely to buy products based on a friend’s recommendation rather than an influencer’s or a celebrity’s.
TikTok leads influencer marketing efforts
- 66% of brands use TikTok for influencer marketing compared to 47% on Instagram and 33% on YouTube.
- 48% of U.S. TikTok accounts have never posted a video, using the platform solely for entertainment, product discovery, and news.

To enhance efforts on content creation, including providing influencers guidelines on product promotion or collaborating on concepts with them, consider using generative AI. Narrato is a versatile solution, creating social media posts, refining them using an intelligent inline AI editor, and generating meme ideas to increase the number of creative ideas for campaigns. Learn more about Narrato in the discussion below.

Create engaging social media posts within seconds

Narrato is a generative AI content assistant helping marketers boost content creation speed to post consistently on social media and save time for strategic and creative tasks that require human insights and experience. For creative automation at scale, try the enterprise generative AI platform Typeface, Narrato’s parent company, a rising star in multimodal AI content space and a Gartner® Cool Vendor™. Typeface’s AI product photography is great to not only enhance eCommerce visuals but to also create engaging posts on social media. The AI learns your brand guidelines, color schemes, audiences, and tone of voice to create messages and visuals that look and sound authentic.

By repurposing existing brand assets into engaging social media posts, Typeface scales content generation and by automatically resizing creative assets generated on the platform into different formats and languages, accelerates local and global campaign publishing. You can try Typeface on a 30-day free trial.

Narrato is also available on a 7-day free trial to provide sufficient time to explore the solution’s features and templates. Drive your content strategy with these capabilities: