A few years ago, the Mohammad bin Rashid School of Government released its first Arab Social Media Report with an aim to "enhance regional understanding of the impact of social media."

Now it's back with its 7th edition, and the findings compiled from Arab countries are quite surprising. 

Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the Arab world

Source: mbrsg.ae

Contrary to popular belief, Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform in Arab countries, with around 156 million users as of January 2017 - up from 115 million in 2016. 

The average number of Facebook accounts per country average 6.7 million accounts. In 7 of the 22 Arab countries, the number of Facebook accounts exceeds the regional average including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, UAE and Syria. 

Around 23 percent of all Arab Facebook users come from Egypt

Egypt is still in the lead in terms of Facebook users, with approximately 34.5 active accounts. Around 23 percent of all Arab Facebook users come from Egypt. 

The top five countries in terms of Facebook accounts include Egypt (35 million), Saudi Arabia (18 million), Algeria (16 million), Iraq (14 million) and Morocco (13 million). 

Over the past two years, the largest number of new users joining Facebook came from Egypt (14 million) followed by Algeria (9.4 million) and Iraq (7.3 million). 

Half of all tweets in the region come from two countries: Saudi Arabia and Egypt

The number of monthly active Twitter users in the Arab world has doubled from 5.8 million three years ago. 

The total number of monthly users is estimated to reach 11.1 million this coming March. 

When it comes to number of active Twitter users, the largest share goes to Saudi Arabia with more than 2.6 million active users, garnering about 29 percent share of all Twitter users in the Arab world. 

Egypt comes in second in terms of highest number of active users with around 1.7 million. 

More than half of all tweets generated in the Arab region come from two countries: Saudi Arabia (33 percent of all tweets) and Egypt (20 percent of all tweets). 

Saudi nationals and Egyptians are not the most "active":

When it comes to most "active users", Kuwait tops the ranks, producing an average of 4.2 tweets per day. It is followed by Saudi Arabia and Palestine. 

People in the UAE are taking over LinkedIn

The total number of LinkedIn users in the Arab world grew 22 percent over the course of a year, with 16.6 million users as of Jan 2017. 

20 percent of all LinkedIn users in the Arab region are based in the UAE, followed by Saudi (16.2 percent), Egypt (15.6 percent), Morocco (9.5 percent) and Algeria (8.4 percent). 

People in Saudi are all about Instagram pictures

There are around 7.1 million active Instagram users in the Arab world as of Jan 2017. 

Saudi Arabia has the highest share of Instagram users in the region, with 30 percent of all active Instagram accounts being in the kingdom. 

It is followed by the UAE (17 percent), Egypt (11.3 percent), Lebanon(8 percent) and Kuwait (5 percent).