Qatar, UAE have highest penetration of social media in the world: report

Qatar and the UAE enjoy the world’s highest social media penetration, at 99% each, according a new report. The report also stated that overall Internet usage in the Middle East had jumped by 15% compared to the previous year.

Qatar also has the highest percentage of any population using social media through mobile devices (95%), while UAE was second with (88%) and Saudi Arabia was just under half the population (49%).

Of the 246 million people living in the Middle East, 60% (147m) now use the internet. Around 34% of them (93m) are also active on social media, said a report in Live Mint.

Hootsuite, a widely used social media management platform, and ‘We Are Social,’ a global social media agency, examined data from 238 countries before publishing a report titled ‘Digital in 2017.’

The research also found that a mind-boggling 1.61bn people buy things online. This amounts to 22% of the world’s total population.

While around 99% of people in the UAE use internet, 70% does so in Saudi Arabia and 93% in Bahrain.

While Qatar and the UAE enjoy the world’s highest social media penetration, Saudi Arabia saw the highest growth in penetration with a 73% rise resulting in 59% of the Saudi population using social channels.

If you are reading this story on a mobile device, then congratulations, you too contributed to making this enviable statistic a reality.