Facebook surpasses TikTok as Kenya’s go-to social media platform
Instagram and WhatsApp have also risen in the national rankings, overtaking Microsoft and YouTube, which previously held fourth and fifth positions.
Kenyan social media users are increasingly turning to Facebook, pushing the platform ahead of TikTok in the country’s popularity rankings for 2025.
The shift reflects the platform’s strategic focus on short videos and personalised content, which have drawn more users back to the 21-year-old network.
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Google continues to dominate overall internet traffic in Kenya.
Recent data from Cloudflare, a web traffic monitoring and infrastructure provider, shows TikTok, which led in 2024, has fallen behind Facebook, now ranking as the second-most visited social platform.
Instagram and WhatsApp have also risen in the national rankings, overtaking Microsoft and YouTube, which previously held fourth and fifth positions.
X, formerly known as Twitter, has lost traction, dropping out of the top 10 after ranking sixth last year.
“On social media, after the juggernauts Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, Snapchat is now outperforming X,” Cloudflare said.
TikTok, launched globally in 2018, became a major hit in Kenya during the Covid-19 pandemic, fueled by viral challenges and short videos from popular creators.
In response, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, introduced Reels on Instagram in 2020 and later on Facebook itself.
The platform has since redesigned its video experience, making all clips Reels and presenting them in a full-screen, vertical format similar to TikTok.
The social media giant has also shifted away from a friends-and-family-focused News Feed, favouring algorithm-driven content recommendations.
Users now see videos from accounts they do not follow, tailored to their interests, echoing TikTok’s ‘For You’ page model, which has been crucial to its user engagement.
Globally, Cloudflare reports that Google remains the most popular service, followed by Facebook and Apple.
TikTok has dropped from fourth to eighth place in Kenya’s platform rankings.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become the most widely used generative AI platform in Kenya, followed by QuillBot, GitHub Copilot, DeepSeek, and Windsurf AI.
OpenAI, for the first time, ranks among the country’s top search engines at fifth position.
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