Trend watch: Facebook in the Middle East

A summary of how the Middle East used Facebook in 2019

Image source: www.thenational.ae

Facebook hit 181 million monthly users in the MENA by March 2019, growing to 187 million active monthly users towards the end of the year.

Within that:

• Egypt is home to 38 million daily users and 40 million monthly users, making it the leading market for the network.
• Saudi Arabia, the second most populous country in MENA, has 16 million monthly Facebook users. Globally, Facebook’s audience reached 2.45 billion monthly active users as of September 30, 2019.

Arab Youth + Facebook

Young people in the region are considerably more likely to get their news from Facebook than traditional media, the annual Arab Youth Survey revealed.

One key reason for this, is that:

“…Social media is trusted ‘to do the right thing’ more than traditional media among young Arabs, with 60% stating they had trust in social media (to do the right thing)… This compares with 55% of respondents saying they had trust in traditional media (TV, newspapers…