The Digital 2026 report (DataReportal, We Are Social and Meltwater), published in late 2025 with data from October 2025, paints the numeric picture of digital use in Belgium. Three takeaways worth having before you decide where to place your budget.
1. An almost fully connected country
Out of a population of 11.8 million, Belgium had 11.3 million internet users at the end of 2025, an online penetration of 96.3%. There were also 12.0 million mobile connections, the equivalent of 102% of the population. In other words: your audience is online, and it is mobile. A slow site, or one poorly suited to smartphones, loses customers before the first contact.
2. Each platform reaches a different audience
Belgium counted 9.08 million social media identities, 77.2% of the population. But those users are not spread evenly. Based on the platforms' own advertising data in late 2025:
- YouTube: 9.08 million users, the widest reach in the country.
- Facebook: 6.20 million.
- LinkedIn: 6.20 million members, a sizeable B2B pool for a market this size.
- Instagram: 5.10 million.
- Snapchat: 4.29 million.
- TikTok: 4.03 million users aged 18 and above.
These figures measure potential advertising audiences, not monthly active users, and the same person appears on several platforms. They still give a reliable order of magnitude to work from.
3. What these figures change for your campaigns
The "we're on Facebook, so we're visible" reflex no longer holds. For broad awareness, YouTube and Facebook remain the mass channels. For B2B, LinkedIn concentrates a professional audience that is rare at this scale. To reach the under-25s, TikTok and Snapchat carry far more weight than their reputation suggests. The right channel is not the most popular in absolute terms, it is the one where your customer is, at the lowest acquisition cost.
The AI lens, humans first
AI speeds up reading this data: cross-referencing an audience by platform, simulating a budget split, or spotting in real time that a channel is slipping. Useful for the first pass, not for the call. Choosing a media mix means weighing an audience against a buying intent, a cost against a margin, a channel against the brand's image. Those trade-offs remain an expert's craft. That is our stance: humans first, AI in support.
This week
List your three current channels and test them against where your target actually is. If a budget is going to a platform where your customer is absent, move it to the one where they spend their time. A simple refocus often improves returns without spending another euro.
At Vistalaro, the choice of channels is never a matter of fashion. Our paid campaigns (Vistalaro Reach) are steered by data and acquisition cost, and a dedicated senior marketer (Vistalaro Pilot) builds the media mix from your real target, not from the trend of the moment.
Is your budget going to the right place?
Let's look together at where your audience is and identify the most cost-effective channels for your SME.
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