There is no doubt that any kind of decisions must be built on accurate data; and social media platforms provide an enormous amount of data that is changing the ways policies are conducted, decisions are taken and day-to-day operations are carried out.

Arab Social Media Report 2017 analyzes how social media data along with several survey results are compiled to provide you with a thorough understanding of how Arab people use the social media and perceive the overwhelming trends for IoT. Out of the unlimited finding explored throughout the report; the following highlights can be pinpointed:

Social Media Usage in the Arab World 2017:

• Across the Arab region, social media platforms are still youthful with 64% of users are under 30 years old, and also male-oriented with female users are making only about 33% of the total users.
• Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform in the region with around 156 million users by early 2017, up from 115 million a year earlier and it keeps growing quite differently than other networks.
• With the largest base of Facebook users, Egypt also shows the highest growth in the number of Facebook users, as it gained more than 14 million new users during the last 30-month period, followed by Algeria, gaining 9.3 million new users, then Iraq (7.2 m), Saudi (5.7 m) and Morocco (5.5 m).
• In terms of penetration rates to population, the regional penetration rate of Facebook accounts stands at 34% on average; while Qatar has the highest penetration rate followed by UAE.
• When it comes to Twitter users, Algeria witnessed the largest growth of numbers of new active users on Over the past 2 years, followed by Egypt & UAE.

Social Media Data Quality:

• On average, 46% of respondents hold more than one account at any given platform. This gets to a very critical rate for Facebook with about 34% of respondents said that they have more than one Facebook account.
• Around 15% of respondents said that they provide false personal information on social media, names are the most kind of false information that written on social media with a rate of 60.9%, followed by age or birthday with a rate of 39.8%, the location, city or country.

Perceptions and Attitudes Towards IoT:

• 47% of respondents have Apps installed on their smartphones that interact with physical IoT devices, and about 65% of respondents said that they own an Internet-enabled device that classifies as an entertainment device, with Internet-enabled TVs being the largest category (20%).
• Around 48% of respondents said that they would not allow their IoT devices to interact with other people they know, and around 50% said that in the future they would not allow IoT devices to share data with social media accounts.

A Graph Shows The Social Media Growth in The Arab Region Between 2012 and 2016.