How many minutes a day does the average person spend on social media?

How to get close to this number

Take the total online figure and apply a share. This site's companion question puts total daily internet use at around six and a half hours, and social media is roughly a third to a half of that. A third of six and a half hours gives a figure in the low hundreds of minutes.

The lifetime conversion is the framing that lands: around six full years over a lifetime. Converting a daily habit into a life total is the most effective way to make a routine behaviour visible, because two and a half hours sounds ordinary and six years does not.

The national variation in the explanation is large and consistent: some countries spend more than double what others do. That spread tracks smartphone adoption patterns, the age structure of the population and how much of daily social life has moved online — so a global average describes a middle that few countries actually occupy.