Your company’s social media marketing approach will benefit greatly from your intimate familiarity with the scope of each of these networks. It’s also important to grasp additional subtleties associated with the development of the platform.
Putting your brand’s marketing efforts into one particular social media platform is a huge choice that shouldn’t be made on the fly.
The “feel right” of a social media platform for your company is important, but there are many more factors to consider before making the switch. Most significantly, “relative popularity” and “growth” are among the top considerations.
By number of users, these are the 15 most popular social media platforms:
The “number of active users” is the statistic we employ to assess the size of a social network; that is, the total number of distinct individuals that are presently enrolled on the platform. The tech sector as a whole relies heavily on this measure as a barometer of success.
- An Analysis of the 15 Most Popular Social Networks
- Number One: Facebook, With 2.74 Billion Monthly Users
- When it comes to social networking sites, Facebook is clearly the best.
Facebook is the social media behemoth that not only showed the world what the internet can be but also profoundly revolutionised the way people connect with one another, even if it can’t take credit for getting everything started (that honour belongs to SixDegrees, RIP).
2.291 Billion Monthly Active Users on YouTube
With 2.29 billion subscribers, YouTube is the second most popular social media network on our list.
Since YouTube is accessible to anybody, regardless of account status, this statistic may not be the best indicator of the platform’s actual popularity.
When it first debuted in 2005, the site’s creators allegedly placed ads on Craigslist to encourage single women to share videos of themselves talking about the qualities they were looking for in a potential mate.
Two Billion Monthly Active WhatsApp Users
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by two ex-Yahoo! workers with the intention of just displaying “statuses” next to the names of each item in a user’s contact book rather than as an IM software.
“At some point it sort of became instant messaging,” Alex Fishman, a friend of WhatsApp’s founder Jan Koum, told Forbes.
Because of this unplanned development, the software came to dominate the free IM market, and its creators would eventually become extremely wealthy after Facebook purchased the company for $16 billion in 2014.
1.3 Billion Monthly Active Users for Facebook’s Messenger
Having a service INSIDE Facebook’s primary platform get to the number four spot on this renowned list is a testament to Facebook’s strength.
Even though Messenger is integrated into the largest social network in the world, WhatsApp has been far more successful.
The first iteration of “Messenger” was a basic instant messaging function called “Facebook Chat” that debuted in the Facebook ecosystem in 2008. Facebook reworked Chat and renamed it “Facebook Messenger” two years later after realising it could function as a separate app with its own distinct business environment.
The creators of Messenger, in contrast to those of WhatsApp, had no qualms about embedding advertising within the app’s essential functionalities. Therefore, Messenger provides companies with an unprecedented degree of communication with their clients and potential clients.
Using Messenger, you can communicate with potential customers in more ways than you can count on two hands. A B2C marketer’s fantasy, Messenger allows for anything from automated chatbots to handle questions and pitch items to in-box ads.
Facebook boasts that every month, over 20 billion messages are exchanged between companies and ordinary users, and that over 40 million active businesses utilise Messenger to communicate with potential consumers.
1.221 Billion Monthly Active Instagram Users 5
With 1.22 billion monthly active users, Instagram is the most popular photo-sharing app in the world.
Kevin Systrom, a former Google employee, founded Instagram in 2009 after conducting an exhaustive study of the existing social media ecosystem.
Systrom received seed investment early on, which allowed him to change the app’s focus from luring just whisky and bourbon enthusiasts to appealing to a wider audience. Something with cutting-edge image-editing tools and a more comprehensive social experience than any other photo-sharing platform at the time.
Weixin/WeChat, Number 6 with 1.21 Billion Monthly Users
It’s no wonder that WeChat is so high on our list; it has such a broad variety of features that its users can do anything from make text and video calls to buy things online and play games.
Active Users on TikTok: 689 Million
TikTok is one of those improbable overnight successes. The video-sharing site made its global debut in 2017 and has since amassed adoption numbers that have left its rivals sobbing into their keyboards.
TikTok was one of the five most downloaded applications in the world just two years after it first appeared on the social media scene. One year later, it topped the charts. And not just by a little bit. A whopping 250 million more people downloaded the upstart social network than downloaded WhatsApp.
QQ Has 617 Million Monthly Users
QQ’s massive popularity may be traced back to the fact that it was the first similarly beneficial platform to hit the market, particularly in a region that deliberately restricts so many external cloud-based programmes.
QQ, however ubiquitous in China, has failed to make an impact outside the country’s borders. The international versions of the platform were largely useless because they weren’t compatible with many useful QQ products.
Last but not least
If you want your social media marketing efforts to be successful, you need to learn as much as you can about a platform before you start advertising your company on it.
The qualities and capabilities of various distribution channels determine which ones are most suited for a certain brand. Similarly, distinct cultural legacies and traditions each appeal to a certain type of audience.