Share of Instagram influencer audiences UAE 2023, by gender

As of June 2023, more than half of the Instagram influencer audience in the United Arab Emirates were male users. Meanwhile, the female audience of Instagram influencers accounted for 41.5 percent in the country.

 United Arab Emirates, socially influenced

The share of the population with access to mobile internet in the United Arab Emirates was 95.85 percent in 2022, ranking second on mobile internet penetration rate globally. Three out of four internet users in the country claimed to follow some type of social media influencer as of July 2021, therefore topping the world ranking in this regard. When it comes to gender, the social media landscape is dominated by young male users; for example, Meta’s ad audience in the United Arab Emirates  had a high age concentration between 18 and 34 as of January 2023. Reflective of audience needs and demographics, more than half of the country's Instagram influencers are young men targeting their young male followers.

 Preferred social media platforms and trends

Users ranked WhatsApp first and Instagram second as their favorite platforms in 2022. A slightly different picture emerges regarding the number of creators with more than ten million followers, also known as supernova creators. The social media platform distribution of the supernova creators in the United Arab Emirates indicates a general creator concentration on video content platforms like TikTok and YouTube, which together hosted 17 such creators as of September 2022.

Favorable demographics and fruitful digital initiatives by the government combined with the new reality the pandemic imposed, among others, facilitated the United Arab Emirates’ high rate of online consumers who shop from social media networks platforms. This has resulted in an 86 percent social e-commerce adoption rate in 2022.