Facebook has overtaken TikTok to become the most popular social media platform in Kenya, driven by a shift in user habits as more people spend time on video-led content on the Meta-owned site.
Data from web infrastructure provider and traffic monitor Cloudflare shows that the 21-year-old platform climbed one place in 2025 to rank as the country’s second-most visited internet platform, up from third place last year.
TikTok, which had held the top position in 2024, dropped in the rankings, while Google remained Kenya’s most visited internet platform. The data also shows a reshuffle among other major services, with Instagram and WhatsApp replacing Microsoft and YouTube, which ranked fourth and fifth last year.
X has continued to lose ground in Kenya, falling from sixth place in 2024 to missing from the top 10 entirely.
Cloudflare said user attention is now concentrating on platforms that combine social interaction with short video content. “On social media, after the juggernauts Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, Snapchat is now outperforming X,” the company said.
TikTok, which launched globally in 2018, rose quickly in popularity from 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic as short videos, trends, and viral challenges spread among content creators and audiences.
In response to this growth, Facebook owner Meta introduced short-form videos known as Reels on Instagram in 2020 and later rolled out the feature on Facebook to compete directly with TikTok.
Since then, Meta has changed how content is shown to users, giving more space to Reels in feeds and turning all videos on Facebook into Reels.
This shift created a full-screen vertical video layout similar to TikTok’s design. Facebook has also moved away from a News Feed built mainly around friends and family posts, choosing instead to push recommended content, including videos, from accounts users do not follow, based on their interests.
This approach mirrors TikTok’s personalised “For You” page, which has played a major role in keeping users engaged. Cloudflare’s global data shows that Google remained the world’s most popular service in 2025, followed by Facebook and Apple. TikTok fell from fourth place last year to eighth this year.
In Kenya, Cloudflare data also shows growing use of artificial intelligence tools. OpenAI’s ChatGPT emerged as the most widely used generative AI platform in the country, ahead of QuillBot, GitHub Copilot, DeepSeek, and Windsurf AI. OpenAI also entered Kenya’s list of top search engines for the first time, ranking fifth.
