UAE residents spend five hours a day on social media

Millennials in the United Arab Emirates are spending up to six hours a day on social media, research has found.

Across the age groups, UAE residents reported they spent roughly five hours a day using social media, while nearly a third have six to 10 applications installed on their smartphones according to new research from YouGov.

Facebook was found to be the most popular platform among users aged between 18 and 35, with more than 80 per cent of users accessing the social network several times a week.

YouTube and LinkedIn were the next most popular sites with 58 per cent  and 26 per cent of people using the sites respectively, a YouGov survey of 5000 people found.

Meanwhile, platforms such as Flickr, Foursquare, Reddit and Tumblr were said to be the least regularly used social media sites, accessed by less than 2 per cent of respondents.

 More than 70 per cent of YouGov respondent said they used their smartphones to access Facebook, while roughly a fifth accessed it via their laptop. Conversely, LinkedIn was the most accessed social media site via a laptop with just over half naming it as their device of choice.

YouGov consumer research director Nehal Hassan Jibouri said, “Our research confirms how social media today plays an integral role in the lives of UAE residents. It serves two main desires – it fulfills (but also created) a need to share precious moments with others and has also become a means to gain, gather and exchange information.”

The UAE has the highest per capita mobile phone penetration in the Middle East, estimated at 80.6 per cent of the population and going up to 82.8 per cent by 2019, according to the 2015 Global Media Intelligence (GMI) report.

As of 2015,  606 million people in the Middle East are believed to have at least one mobile phone this year, with the figure expected to grow to 789 million by 2019, the GMI report added.