Social Media

By the Terrain desk. The data we have been presented with tells us Instagram is shrinking in Nigeria. But read properly, it says something quite different to what the industry has spent this year repeating, including me, who had come to the same conclusion. Almost every media plan, agency recommendation and confident post about Nigerian social media traces back to one document. It is called Digital 2026: Nigeria , put together by DataReportal with We Are Social and Meltwater, and for most people it is the only comprehensive free source that exists. It is free, it is sitting there, and you can open it in about a minute. Which means an entire industry is reading off a single sheet of paper. That is worth sitting with before we even get to what it says. Here is what it says. TikTok reaches 47.8 million Nigerian adults . Facebook 38 million. YouTube 30.5 million. Snapchat 23 million. LinkedIn 13 million. Instagram 10 million. X just under 7 million. Year on year, TikTok is up 43.4 percent, Snapchat up 30.2 percent, LinkedIn up 18.2 percent, YouTube up 13 percent, Facebook up 6.9 percent.…