Is Facebook Dead.

Is Facebook dead? No. In the UK, Ofcom found that Facebook and Messenger together are used by 93% of adults, and global survey data still ranks Facebook as the most used social platform in the world.

What Facebook has lost, in our view, is buzz, not users. For a brand, asking whether it is dead is the wrong question. The useful one is whether your audience is there, and what they are there to do.

Strategy should start from that, not from how a platform feels this year.

What the UK figures say

Ofcom’s Online Nation report, published in December 2025, looks at how people in the UK use the internet. Its headline on apps is plain: WhatsApp, Facebook and Google Maps are the three most commonly used apps among adults.

On reach, Ofcom found that the combination of Facebook and Messenger is used by 93% of adults, which makes it the most widely used Meta service. WhatsApp follows at 90%. YouTube, the most used service Alphabet owns, reaches 94% of adults.

Two cautions keep that figure honest. Ofcom counts Facebook and Messenger together, so 93% is not a Facebook-only number. And it measures whether people use a service, not how long they spend on it.

Ofcom also found that half of all time online in the UK is now spent on services owned by Alphabet and Meta.

What the global figures say

DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Mid-Year Global Update draws on a survey by the research firm GWI, in which people aged 16 and over say which platforms they have used in the past month.

On that measure, Facebook remains the world’s most popular social platform. 56.3% of internet users aged 16 and over said they had used it within the past month.

That world figure includes China and Russia, where many Western platforms are restricted. Leave those two countries out and Facebook rises to 73.4%, still first, ahead of Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Messenger and TikTok.

Where the picture is less flattering

Survey answers tell you who uses a platform. They do not tell you how often people open it.

DataReportal also reports data from Similarweb, which tracks how often apps are actually opened across millions of smartphones. On that measure Facebook only places fourth, and its active app audience is about three quarters the size of YouTube’s.

So the honest summary is this. In the UK, almost every adult uses Facebook or Messenger, and worldwide more people say they use Facebook than any other social platform. On app usage data, though, it ranks fourth.

Why it feels dead anyway

Dead, in marketing conversation, usually means unfashionable. That is a judgement about mood, and it says nothing about whether your customers scroll the feed.

The DataReportal report points to a better explanation for the feeling. More than seven in ten Facebook users visit the platform to stay in touch with friends and family. Barely a quarter of TikTok users go to TikTok for that reason.

In our view, a platform people use to keep up with their own lives works like a utility. Utilities rarely make headlines, which is not the same as losing their users.

What that means for brand content

If most people open Facebook to see friends and family, a brand post is competing with a cousin’s holiday photos and a school group’s update. That shapes what works.

In our view, the content that earns a place there is the content people would pass on to someone they know:

• local news and information that matters to the reader’s area
• practical posts people forward to a partner or a parent
• community posts that start a conversation rather than announce something
• video that someone would share with a friend, not just watch

Content written only to announce or sell sits awkwardly in a feed built around people.

When Facebook is worth the effort

Facebook earns a place in the plan when your own audience data says your customers are there and you have content that suits why they open it. For a brand selling to adults in the UK, the reach figures make it hard to rule out without checking.

If you are weighing it against its sister app, the more useful question is which one your audience actually uses, covered in Facebook or Instagram for your business audience.

When it is not

It is not worth the effort when a team keeps a Page alive out of habit, posts the same content it posts everywhere else, and never looks at what it returns. A dormant Page is not proof that Facebook is dead. It is proof that nobody owns it.

The same goes for chasing it because it is big. Reach across a country is not reach to your customers.

How NBK thinks about Facebook

The mistake we see is not choosing the wrong platform. It is choosing platforms by mood and then running them with no system behind them.

A better process asks three things before a platform gets a place in the plan: is our audience there, what do they go there to do, and do we have the people and the workflow to post well there every week. For many UK audiences the reach figures suggest Facebook passes the first test. The other two depend on the team. That is the work behind our Facebook and Instagram service.

Next step

Before you decide Facebook is dead for your brand, check your own audience data and your last three months of Page results. If the Page has been running on autopilot, fix the basics first with our guide to setting up and growing a Facebook business Page.

If your social output feels busy but not effective, start with an NBK audit.