Social networks
With the birth and rise of social media, Lebanese people have quickly used new technologies to connect, communicate and share information with each other. Over the past years, a slight dip in the demographic trend has been observed, as users over the age of 30 have steadily uptaken social media usage.
Facebook and Whatsapp are the most used social media channels in Lebanon, followed by Twitter and Instagram. According to data from the Internet World Stats, with 3.96 million Facebook subscribers (Dec 2019), Facebook penetration in Lebanon reaches the 58% (+8% compared to 2016), a rate that indicates a continuous growth and a pervasive use of this social network in the society. The Arab Social Media Report (ASMR 2017) reveals that English is the dominant language on Facebook, with the largest percentage of Facebook posts from Lebanese accounts written in English (65 percent, 33 percent in Arabic and less than 10 percent in French).
Being connectivity the main reason for people to use social media in the first place, it comes as no surprise that Twitter is by far less popular than Facebook, and Lebanon is no exception. The penetration of Twitter in Lebanon is slightly below 3 percent – as the statistics provided by the aforementioned ASMR demonstrate – with a total number of active users in Lebanon of 250,000 people as of March 2016.As officially defined by Twitter, an “active user” is someone who logs in (but does not necessarily tweets) once a month. As with Facebook, Lebanon is the most gender-balanced country in the Arab world. Even if the number of total users slightly increased, the estimated number of tweets produced diminished: 15,7m tweets in March 2016 compared to 18m in March 2014.
Instagram has reached an increasing penetration of 23% among the Lebanese population, with a total 1.6 million users in 2020, compared to 1.3 million users in 2017. Almost all of the media outlets created an official Instagram accounts to increase their audience and to broadcast more visually pleasant content.