Finally, we got an official news regarding the social media users in Iran. Currently there are 47 million social media users in Iran and it’s counting.
Smartphones
Iranians are tech-savvy and they adapt to new technologies really fast. To give you a glimpse, there were 2 million smartphones in 2014, 20 million in 2015, 40 million in 2016 and right now it’s estimated that there are at least 46 million smartphones in the country. Since there is no official news regarding the number of smartphones, we came up with this number through the number of Cafe Bazaar installs, which is 39 million installs and the number of iPhones which is estimated to be around 6 to 7 million units. Note that there are some people in the country who haven’t installed Cafe Bazaar, the Iranian Android market app on their devices so the total number of smartphones should be at least 46 million devices.
Internet Access
It was in 2011 that the third operator, Rightel, exclusively brought limited 3G network. It was only in August 2014 that MCI received its 3G and 4G license along with Irancell after three years of Rightel’s exclusivity on providing 3G services in the country. Basically, 3G and 4G networks have been around for 3 years for the mass population. Currently, there are 26 million mobile internet (3G and 4G) subscribers from all the mobile network operators in Iran.
Talking about the Internet access, according to Statistical Center of Iran, 13.5 million households (55.5%) have access to the internet. Of this number, 7 million households (51.9%) have access to fixed high-speed internet connection and 10.7 million households (79%) have access to the wireless high-speed internet.
You can check the growth of internet users in the chart below.
More than 47 Million Iranian Social media Users
When you have a tech-savvy population with 46 million smartphones along with a basic but stable internet access, you can guess that there should be a lot of social media users. That’s basically what has happened in Iran. According to the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Reza Salehi Amiri, there are currently 47 million active social media users in Iran. Salehi Amiri also stated that during the recent presidential election, three billion messages were exchanged in the digital world which is a big number. This is not yet known if 3 billion messages have been sent by individuals or have been seen by individuals. Another point that Salehi Amiri made is that Family interactions have decreased to 20 minutes in comparison to two hours in previous years because of the social networks.
Overall, from the statistics that we shared today, you can see that the internet and social media are changing the way Iranians live their lives more than ever in a short period of time. Drop us a comment, tell us what do you think about this change and where do you think it is headed.
You can check these articles if you are interested to know more about the social media in Iran:
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