Social Media Usage in The United States Vs. Italy

I have always been curious as to how other countries utilize social media compared to the United States, especially in Europe because I love it there!

Out of all the countries that are actively using social media, the United States is 15th in social network penetration at 70% while Italy is 30th with 59%. The United States has 246.7 million social network users as of 2019 where Italy only has 43.31 million social network users!

Although the United States has more active users on social media, Italy and the United States have a lot in common when it comes to social networking!

Commonalities:

Of all the social media platforms, Facebook is the most popular among both countries. As of 2018, the Facebook penetration rate in Italy was 58%, with 89.3% of those being 14-23 year olds.

For the United States 82% of 18-29 year olds are on Facebook with 83.8% of social network users actively on Facebook.

With this information, I can make the comparison between the two countries in the fact that their most used social platform is Facebook and that a good percentage of those users are in the teens or high twenties.

This isn’t what I found most interesting though.

Facebook is the most popular in both countries between the ages 30-45 roughly. In the United States 89% of 30-44 year olds are using Facebook. In Italy 53% of users are 35 plus.

With that being said, it is clear that teenagers are gravitating away from Facebook and Facebook is most popular among the older generations, even in other countries!

YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Google + are also among the top 10 most popular social media apps in Italy and the same goes in the United States.

Differences:

Have you ever heard of an app called WhatsApp? I didn’t know much about this app at all until looking at what is most popular in Italy.

It turns out this app is the third most popular app in Italy with a penetration of 59%. It is basically like our Facebook Messenger where you can instantly message your friends when ever you want for free!

As of 2019, only 23.4 million people in the United States are using this app while in Italy 7 out of 10 Italians are using it. They are among the top 10 countries that use the WhatsApp!

The reason the WhatsApp is so popular abroad is because it’s free. In the United States, we have flat rate SMS texting that comes standard on nearly all phone carriers.

In other countries, it can cost on average $0.11 per text. So, it makes sense that this app is so popular abroad. It’s how everyone communicates with one another for free.

While WhatsApp is third most used in Italy, Instagram is third most used in the United States with 105 million active users.

As I also stated earlier, the United States has a lot more people actively using social media. With a population of about 325.7 million in the United States and 246.7 million on social media, that is roughly 75% of the population on social media.

Whereas Italy, with a population of about 60.59 million and 43.41 million social media users, that is about 71% of the population on social media.

This lets us know that the United States is using social media at a rate of about 4% more than Italy is with comparison to their population size.

Overall:

I found that overall the two countries aren’t that much different in social media usage! Although Italy uses the WhatsApp a lot more than we do here in the United States, a lot of the other popular social media apps are the same.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google + are all very popular and widely used social media platforms in both countries!

The next time I go abroad, I am going to need to download the WhatsApp now that I know what it is and how popular it is over there!