WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app on the planet (with over 3 billion monthly active users) and can be an excellent tool for businesses. In fact, brands can create ads through WhatsApp Business and use WhatsApp for customer service to take advantage of the platform’s colossal community.
But first, getting a good idea of how WhatsApp users compare to your target audience is vital.
Is your brand focused on women between the ages of 55 and 64? High-income American adults? Brazilian internet users who don’t mind ads? Whatever your goals, WhatsApp may be the key to kicking that social media marketing game up a notch.
Let’s look at some data.
Bonus: Download our free WhatsApp for Customer Care guide to get more pointers on how to use WhatsApp Business to get higher conversion rates, better customer experience, lower costs, and higher customer satisfaction.
General WhatsApp statistics
1. Globally, WhatsApp has about three billion monthly users.
Yes, that’s a billion WhatsApp users. The messaging and video calling app launched in 2009 and quickly proved it has that Boom Boom Pow (much like the Black Eyed Peas song that also came out in 2009).
To put that in perspective, earth’s population is around 8 billion, which means around 4 in every 10 people use Whatsapp monthly—that’s a market size that social media managers can’t ignore.
Source: Statista
2. Over 51 million people download WhatsApp every month.
According to a January 2024 Statista study, WhatsApp has every other messenger app beat for monthly downloads. In fact, other apps aren’t even close: the next most-downloaded app is Snapchat, which has about 10 million fewer.
Telegram has 36.7 million downloads, and fourth place goes to—oh, lookie there, it’s WhatsApp Business.
Source: Statista
We’ll talk more about WhatsApp Business later in this post… for now, you can digest the news that together, WhatsApp Messenger and WhatsApp Business have 79 million monthly downloads.
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3. Half of all social media users say they use social media to keep in touch with friends and family.
Why is WhatsApp so popular? The results of this 2023 Statista study can shed some light on the app’s success, “keeping in touch with friends and family” is the number one reason people use social media.
Because WhatsApp is an app focused entirely on messaging, voice, and video calls, it’s perfect for keeping in touch with people you personally know. Unlike other platforms like TikTok or Facebook messenger, the majority of time spent on WhatsApp is devoted to private conversation, not entertainment from strangers.
Source: Statista
WhatsApp user statistics
4. The gender breakdown of WhatsApp users is relatively even.
Some social media platforms skew wildly in favour of a single gender. For example, Pinterest users lean female and most Twitter (X) users are male. But WhatsApp’s gender breakdown isn’t quite as conclusive.
According to data available from We Are Social, from We Are Social, 47.6% are women and 52.3% are men, which is about as close as it gets to 50/50.
Source: We Are Social
5. 29% of American adults have used WhatsApp.
This stat doesn’t cover WhatsApp’s user base opinions, just whether a person has ever used it.
But 29% of the U.S. adults the Pew Research Center studied in 2023 said that they have used Whatsapp at least once. It’s in sixth place behind YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn, in that order.
Source: Pew Research Centre
Still, 29% is a good chunk—meaning that a good chunk of Americans are familiar with the platform and have some experience using WhatsApp to communicate.
6. 21% of U.S. teens use WhatsApp.
While 2 in 10 teens say they’ve ever used WhatsApp, the messenger app isn’t the most popular with the youth: 93% use YouTube, 63% use TikTok, and 60% use Snapchat.
Again, the number of teen WhatsApp users is still significant… just not as significant as the number of teen users on other platforms. Marketers focusing on a discerning teenage audience, take note.
Source: Pew Research Center
7. 16% of social media users say WhatsApp is their favourite social media platform…
It’s hard to pick a favourite, but WhatsApp is the number one choice for plenty of folks online. It’s only beat by Instagram.
Source: We Are Social
8. … and men and women between the ages of 35 and 54 have a particular fondness for WhatsApp.
When favourite social media platforms are broken down by age and gender, WhatsApp is the top choice in many categories: women aged 35 to 64, 45 to 54, 55 to 64, and men aged 35 to 64, 45 to 54, and 55 to 64.
So, regardless of gender identity, WhatsApp is a worldwide fave for people over 35 (and should be a favourite for social media marketers targeting that age group).
Source: We Are Social
9. More than half of Hispanic and Asian Americans use WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is most favoured by people of colour (according to data from Pew Research Centre). 20% of white respondents say they have used the platform, 31% of Black respondents have used it, and 54% and 51% of Hispanic and Asian respondents said they have used WhatsApp, respectively.
Psstt: this data doesn’t include non-English speakers, and Pew notes this for the Asian category specifically, indicating that the actual data for that group is likely higher.
Source: Pew Research Center
10. 39% of American college graduates use WhatsApp.
When looking at education data, WhatsApp is most popular with Americans who graduated college—39% of respondents in a 2023 study said they ever used the app. While 23% of U.S. adults who have completed some post-secondary education have used WhatsApp, and 25% in the “high school or less” category have.
Looking at other platforms studied (89% of American college graduates have used YouTube, and 70% have used Facebook), Whatsapp doesn’t quite compare. However, it is more popular with college grads than TikTok or Snapchat.
So, if your brand’s target audience is college graduates, WhatsApp isn’t a bad place to invest some marketing dollars—but consider a Facebook or YouTube strategy, too.
Source: Pew Research Centre
11. 90% of Brazilian adults use WhatsApp.
A 2023 survey by the brains at Pew Research Center reported that WhatsApp is the most popular social media site in middle-income countries (including Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia and South Africa).
Platforms like Twitter and Telegram are the least popular in these parts of the world.
Source: Pew Research Center
Social marketers should consider this geographical data when considering their audience.
If your brand plans to expand to South America, for example, it’s worth noting that WhatsApp is the most popular social media site used in the continent’s two largest countries. This seems like the perfect opportunity to use WhatsApp for customer service.
WhatsApp usage statistics
12. WhatsApp is the third most-used social media platform globally.
According to We Are Social, Facebook and YouTube have the highest users globally, and WhatsApp follows closely behind.
Comparing WhatsApp to a platform like Facebook is a bit like comparing internet apples to oranges—while Facebook is a more typical “social media” app where you can post, share, and comment on content, WhatsApp is used primarily for direct messaging.
Source: We Are Social
13. Less than 1% of WhatsApp users only use WhatsApp.
This ties into the point above: because different apps are used for different reasons, many people use more than one. Out of all WhatsApp users, 0.7% are loyal to WhatsApp and WhatsApp only.
The rest are dabbling in other apps—78% of WhatsApp users are also active on Instagram, 77% use Facebook, and 75% use YouTube. Audience overlap is important for digital marketers to consider so that resources and budgets can be properly allocated.
Source: We Are Social
14. The average Whatsapp user opens the app 8 out of every 10 days.
A study from We Are Social states that from July through September 2023, monthly active WhatsApp users opened the application on 83.2% of days. WhatsApp had the highest percentage of days opened compared to the other platforms studied (Facebook got 64.1%, YouTube got 63.7%, and TikTok got 61.7%).
This proves that many of those “monthly” active users—there are 3 billion of them—actually use the app on an almost daily basis.
Source: We Are Social
15. The average person spends 17 hours on WhatsApp per month.
WhatsApp hours add up, especially in Argentina, Indonesia, Columbia and Brazil, where the average person spends over a day per month on the platform. Globally, the average number of monthly hours spent on WhatsApp is 17 (about the number of hours that most of us spend awake per day).
Source: We Are Social
Social marketers looking to invest in WhatsApp should study the average usage in their targeted country and make an informed decision. For example, the monthly average in Taiwan is only about two hours, so WhatsApp Business likely doesn’t have a large impact on that audience.
WhatsApp statistics for business
16. Every month, about 28 million people download WhatsApp Business.
According to the same 2024 Statista study referenced at the beginning of this post—WhatsApp Business is one of the world’s most downloaded messaging applications. It has more downloaded files than Messenger, WeChat, QQ, and Line.
17. 68% of brands are confident that WhatsApp delivers a positive ROI (return on investment)…
Hootsuite’s 2024 Social Survey found that brands feel good about investing in WhatsApp for their business and social strategy. Nearly 7 in 10 out of the 3,891 respondents said they feel confident that the platform delivers a positive ROI.
In other words, marketers feel that investing in WhatsApp is worth it because they’ll make more money as a result.
The folks who participated in our 2024 Social Survey were digital marketers, public relations professionals, and social media managers like you—and their confidence in the platform (as well as Linkedin and Instagram) is a sign that WhatsApp may be worth opening your wallet for.
18. …but only 5% of brands have a presence on WhatsApp…
Despite marketers’ confidence in the platform, WhatsApp has a relatively small community of businesses using the messenger app.
Hootsuite’s 2024 Social Survey found that 5% of the experts surveyed said their organizations have a presence on WhatsApp. It beat out Snapchat (4%) and BeReal (1%), but doesn’t even come close to Facebook (91%) or Instagram (86%).
19. …and there was a -18% change in WhatsApp use for businesses from 2022 to 2023.
WhatsApp with that? (Sorry, had to).
Brands are confident in WhatsApp’s potential ROI, yet Hootsuite’s 2024 social trends survey indicates that they’re leaving the platform: business presence is decreasing on the app, not increasing.
We can’t be certain what’s causing this discrepancy, but it’s possible that WhatsApp simply isn’t one of the “big fish” in the social media pond, and it can be challenging to manage on top of all your other brand profiles.
In fact, 52% of the marketers surveyed said that one of their biggest concerns for the future is “time or budget investment to maintain a presence on multiple social platforms.”
If only there were a time-saving app you could use to plan, coordinate and schedule all of your social content ahead of time… oh yeah, Hootsuite does that.
WhatsApp advertising statistics
20. 34% of American adults with an income of $100,000 or more use WhatsApp.
Advertising works best if the folks you’re advertising actually have money to spend—and when it comes to the U.S. population, WhatsApp was a popular app among wealthier respondents.
33% of Americans making $70,000 to $99,999 per year use WhatsApp, and 26% of respondents in the $30,000 to $69,999 range use the messaging platform.
Source: Pew Research Center
21. More than half of WhatsApp users in Brazil don’t mind receiving ads through WhatsApp (as long as it’s not too often)
In what might be the longest-titled study ever (“Percentage of WhatsApp users who did not mind receiving advertisements through the app as long as it was not very often in Brazil as of May 2023”), Statista found that 53% of respondents say they’re not bothered by ads on WhatsApp. That is, as long as the advertisements didn’t always show up.
It’s not the most concrete report—after all, everyone’s definition of “not very often” is different—but it does show that a large number of WhatsApp users are open to receiving ads on the platform. This, in turn, means that your brand can invest in WhatsApp ads with the confidence that most users won’t be annoyed by them.
Source: Statista
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