The Top 15 Social Media Sites and Apps are listed below.
- YouTube
- Facebook Messenger
- Weixin/WeChat
- TikTok
- Douyin
- Sina Weibo
- Telegram
- Snapchat
- Kuaishou
1. Facebook
The uncontested heavyweight champion of social media networks is Facebook.
While SixDegrees (RIP) deserves credit for getting things started, Facebook is the social media behemoth that not only showed the world what the internet can be, but also profoundly transformed the way people connect with one another.
Since its inception in 2004, the organization has seen mind-boggling growth despite its stormy early days and continuous affiliation with epic conflicts.
Facebook continues to expand.
It took only 10 months for Facebook to achieve a million users, and eight years for it to reach a billion. Facebook has 2.74 billion active members as of February 2021, with around 500,000 new users added every day, or six new users per second.
Despite its enormous popularity, Facebook isn't the world's most visited website. Its 25.5 billion monthly visitors are surpassed by YouTube's 34.6 billion and completely exceeded by Google's 92.5 billion.
In compared to other social media platforms, Facebook is the most popular among users aged 12 to 34, while its proportion of this group in the United States is steadily declining.
According to The Infinite Dial, in 2015, 58 percent of poll respondents in this age bracket said Facebook was their preferred social network, but that number has dropped to 32 percent in 2020. Instagram is the main offender. In the same time period, the photo and video-sharing social network's proportion of this cohort increased from 15% to 27%.
Here are some more fascinating Facebook statistics:
- India has the most active Facebook users (290 million), followed by the United States (190 million), and Indonesia (140 million).
- In the United States, 73 percent of Facebook users log in every day. 93 percent of Facebook users check in at least once a week, and 98 percent log in at least once a month.
- Despite ongoing criticism of Facebook's role in spreading misinformation, 36% of Americans say they use the platform as a news source on a regular basis.
- The average Facebook user in the United States spends up to 38 minutes each day on the social media platform.
2. YouTube
YouTube, the second-most popular social media network on our list, has a whopping 2.29 billion registered members.
However, because anybody may watch YouTube videos whether or not they're a registered member, this statistic may not be the most accurate reflection of the platform's genuine popularity.
The video-sharing network, which was founded in 2005, was originally meant to be a dating service, with the creators allegedly placing advertising on Craigslist to persuade women to record films of themselves talking about their ideal spouses.
Due to the (understandable) lack of response, the site was opened up to all types of videos – a decision that would make Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim multi-millionaires.
On its route to become not just the world's top video-sharing network, but also the target of a $1.65 billion Google takeover, the firm surmounted several technological and legal challenges. All of this was accomplished by November 2006, barely 16 months after the company's formal inception.
YouTube is also one of a small number of social media channels that reaches children under the age of 13. The following are the findings of a 2020 Pew Research research on the watching habits of US children under the age of 11.
- Parents report that their children watch YouTube videos in 80 percent of cases.
- Only 19% of parents claim that their kids do not view YouTube videos.
- More than half of parents reported that their children viewed YouTube at least once a day.
YouTube has some impressive statistics for reaching the adult market, despite its popularity with a younger audience. YouTube is used by nearly three-quarters (74%) of all adults in the United States. With 68 percent, Facebook comes in second, followed by Instagram with 40 percent.
When it comes to national demographics, only three nations account for more than 30% of all YouTube traffic. The United States is the largest contributor, at 16.4 percent. India is in second place with 9.2 percent, while Japan is in third place with 4.8 percent.
3. WhatsApp
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by two former Yahoo! workers with the intention of merely showing "statuses" next to the names of each item in a user's contact book, rather than being an instant messaging (IM) service.
"It sort of became instant messaging at some point," Alex Fishman, a friend of Jan Koum's, told Forbes.
This serendipitous progression propelled the program to the top of the free IM market, as well as making the creators extremely rich — the latter owing to Facebook's $16 billion acquisition in 2014.
WhatsApp is one of just three social media networks with a user base of more than 2 billion people, a milestone it will attain in 2020. The app's current growth pace has been incredible, with the final billion users joining in less than four years!
WhatsApp lacks the breadth of marketing choices that many other social networks do since it has refused to integrate traditional advertising into its business strategy. However, this does not negate the app's immense marketing potential for firms who use it as a communication tool.
Despite a recent public relations disaster involving an ill-advised privacy policy modification, WhatsApp remains the most popular mobile messaging program on the planet, beating out Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ, Telegram, and Snapchat.
4. Facebook Messenger
The fact that a service within Facebook's main platform ranked fourth on this renowned list speaks much about the company's influence.
It also says a lot about WhatsApp that, despite being integrated into the world's most popular social network, they were able to exceed Messenger by a significant margin.
"Facebook Chat" was Messenger's first version, a rudimentary IM capability that debuted in the Facebook environment in 2008. Facebook updated Chat and relaunched it as "Facebook Messenger" two years later, recognizing its potential as a separate app with its own distinct economic environment.
Unlike WhatsApp, Messenger's owners have no qualms about incorporating revenue capabilities into the fundamental functioning of the software. As a result, Messenger provides businesses with a degree of touch with their consumers and prospects that is unrivaled.
You can communicate with your leads through Messenger in more ways than you can shake a stick at. Messenger is a B2C marketer's dream, with automated chatbots that handle inbound enquiries and sell items, as well as adverts placed in the user's inbox.
Facebook boasts that over 40 million active companies use Messenger to communicate with potential consumers, with over 20 billion messages transferred between businesses and ordinary users each month.
Interestingly, while Messenger currently behind WhatsApp in terms of total worldwide active users, it is clearly the more popular option among users in the United States.
According to Statista's most recent data on US IM engagement, 12.1 percent of US mobile phone owners use WhatsApp, compared to 56.8% for Messenger.
When it comes to Facebook Messenger adoption in the United States, one age group stands out above the rest:
- The app is used by 1.7 percent of 13 to 17-year-olds.
- 14.7 percent of the population is between the ages of 18 and 24.
- 27.3 percent of Messenger's US users are between the ages of 25 and 34.
- With 21%, the 35-44-year-olds come in second.
- Users aged 45 to 51 make up 14.7 percent of the Messenger user population in the country.
5. Instagram
With a total of 1.22 billion active users worldwide, the world's most popular photo-sharing app is ranked fifth.
Instagram was founded in 2009 by Kevin Systrom, a former Google employee, after a thorough examination of the social media ecosystem at the time.
Systrom was able to turn the app, which was originally aimed at whiskey and bourbon connoisseurs, into something more general thanks to an early round of seed money. Something that combined industry-leading image altering technology with a considerably more engaging social experience than any other picture-sharing service available at the time.
The end effect was a social network that was truly monstrous. Instagram has expanded to 35 million users by April 2012, the month Facebook bought it for $1 billion. It had 80 million users three months later. By June 2016, it has surpassed the 500 million milestone.
The emergence of "influencers" is one of Instagram's most enduring contributions to the world of digital marketing. For better or worse, the popularity of certain users gave their profiles a "aspirational" tilt, which led to the emergence of a whole new marketing channel that allowed ordinary people to profit from their celebrity.
Instagram's user population is predominantly made up of people under the age of 35, accounting for 71% of the app's total user base.
It's also a hugely popular tool for B2C marketing, with over 70% of US companies utilizing it. In compared to its main competition, Facebook, Instagram has extremely high engagement rates. Instagram postings had a 23 percent greater interaction rate than Facebook photographs, while having equal functionality and engagement mechanisms.
The United States and India are the platform's two most populous countries, with 140 million users apiece. Brazil (99 million) and Indonesia (88 million) are rated second and third, respectively, while Russia (56 million) is not on the podium.
6. Weixin/WeChat
It's no wonder that WeChat ranks so high on our list because it offers such a diverse set of features that allow users to do anything from send text messages and make video chats to make digital payments and play video games.
It's also a tribute to WeChat's tremendous utility that the app has grown in popularity while actively sharing users' personal data with the Chinese government as part of the latter's widespread monitoring and censorship operations.
Regardless of this terrible cooperation, WeChat has infiltrated practically every facet of Chinese life, as seen by the app's strong adoption by older age groups.
In 2018, 98.5 percent of Chinese mobile users between the ages of 50 and 80 were registered users of WeChat. WeChat users over the age of 60 use more than half of their mobile data on the app.
It's essential to know that 23 percent of America's mobile internet users between the ages of 18 and 24 are enrolled on WeChat for social media marketers considering it as a prospective marketing channel.
7. TikTok
There are success stories that happen overnight, and then there's TikTok. In 2017, the video-sharing site made its international debut, instantly amassing adoption numbers that made competitors weep into their keyboards.
TikTok was among the top five most downloaded applications in the globe two years after it first appeared on the social media scene. It was number one a year later. And it wasn't by a tiny margin. The young social network surpassed its nearest rival, WhatsApp, by a startling 250 million downloads.
For further information, check at the table below. The gap in downloads between WhatsApp and Facebook, which came in third, is barely 60 million!
In terms of demographic reach, TikTok still has a long way to go to catch up to its competitors. Between the ages of 10 and 29, 47 percent of the platform's users in the United States are between the ages of 10 and 29.
8. QQ
QQ is another of Tencent's properties (the other being WeChat), and it has been around for a long time (in internet years).
In 1999, OICQ, a downloaded instant messaging program, was launched in China, swiftly becoming the country's most popular digital communication platform and playing a key part in "killing" email in the world's most populous country.
The software's exceptional handling of file transfers aided QQ's early rise to dominance as a business communication platform. This generated a network effect, in which businesses just HAD to be on QQ since all of their partners, vendors, and clients were already there.
Being first to market with such a beneficial platform, especially in a location where many foreign cloud-based programs are aggressively blocked, contributed to QQ's massive popularity.
Despite its widespread use in China, QQ has yet to have an impact on the rest of the globe. The platform's international versions were not integrated with many valuable QQ goods, making it essentially useless outside of its native area.
9. Douyin
To put it simply, Douyin is a Chinese version of TikTok. The two platforms have the same parent firm and essential functionality, but they are unmistakably two separate applications aimed at two distinct audiences.
Douyin has become one of the most popular luxury marketing platforms in China. Many have struggled to engage the platform's youthful user base in meaningful ways, although there have been some successes.
Unlike TikTok, Douyin has embraced user-monetization and offered content producers with more tangible mechanisms for generating cash from their videos, mostly through integration with big Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Taobao.
10. Sina Weibo
Sina Weibo is a Chinese social media platform that began as a microblogging platform and has now grown to become the country's third-largest social network.
Weibo, unlike the other Chinese platforms on this list, focuses heavily on user-generated content development, delivery, and consumption. It's a resource hub that's been embraced by companies, journalists, influencers, and everyday people alike.
Companies, in particular, have embraced Weibo as a marketing tool, with some multinational companies successfully tapping into China's vast market. Tourism Australia, which earned Weibo's "most promising and popular outbound destination award" at a Chinese influencer conference in 2019, was the most successful of these.
Regrettably, the content shared on Weibo is subject to stringent government surveillance and control, as one might anticipate. However, this hasn't stopped international corporations from attempting to advertise themselves to a third of China's population.
11. Telegram
Telegram has gained the most from WhatsApp's recent PR debacle than any other social network with an emphasis on instant messaging. The repercussions of WhatsApp's forthcoming modifications to its privacy policy were immediate.
Users abandoned the Facebook-owned chat service in droves, opting instead for Telegram, a hyper-secure instant messaging and social networking software popular among blockchain aficionados and cryptocurrency traders.
According to statistics collected from App Annie, WhatsApp fell from 8th to 23rd most downloaded app in the UK between January 1 and January 12 of 2021, according to the Guardian.
Telegram received around 25 million new users within the same time period (January 1 – January 21). In just three weeks, they've increased their user base by 5%! During a month that WhatsApp would rather forget, it also became the world's most downloaded app for both Android and iPhone users.
It's apparent from the graph above that Telegram's adoption skyrocketed between March 2018 and January 2021. Over the course of these three years, the app's monthly active users increased by 150 percent, from 200 million to 500 million in just 34 months.
According to Hootsuite research, Android Telegram users spend more time on the app than Facebook Messenger users. Telegram users spend 2.9 hours each month on average, compared to 2.7 hours on Messenger, according to social media experts.
12. Snapchat
Few would have predicted the success of Snapchat, an app that rejects the idea that "once it's on the internet, it's forever."
Users' uploads on the photo and video-sharing site were renowned for only being visible for a short time before being erased. Forever. This added an element of immediacy to each Snapchat contact, which appealed to a younger generation of mobile internet users.
It also helped that the app broke the pattern when it came to augmented reality filters and lenses, which gave Snapchat conversations a creative irreverence not found on other social media platforms.
Outside of the United States and Europe, Snapchat's daily active users (DAU) have grown at an incredible rate.
The app's usage in these two locations has grown at a constant rate during the four years between Q4 2017 and Q4 2020. DAUs in the rest of the globe, on the other hand, have increased dramatically over this time, rising from 47 million to a whooping 99 million.
Snapchat DAUs in the "rest of the world" now outweigh those in the United States and Europe as of December 2020.
Two numbers stand out from a demographic standpoint:
Snapchat is used by 59 percent of all US internet users aged 13 to 24.
Snapchat has been the most popular social media platform among teenagers and young adults since 2016.
13. Kuaishou
Video-sharing and live streaming are extremely popular among China's 1.5 billion inhabitants. So much so that we're now talking about the second app of its sort that's only targeted at the Chinese market.
Kuaishou is the second-largest video-sharing social network in the area, with almost 80% of Douyin's total active members.
It has many of the same characteristics as Douyin in terms of functionality, but there are significant distinctions in the types of material created by the two networks, as well as how it is vetted and displayed.
- Kuaishou is the more popular live streaming site, with Douyin's local content area hosting twice as many live broadcasts as Kuaishou's.
- Kuaishou's approach to content suggestion is more relationship-focused. A user's feed contains around half of the information from accounts they already follow.
- The great bulk of material displayed on a Douyin user's feed (up to 90%) comes from popular accounts.
Kuaishou's better community focus, according to Chinese social media gurus Walk the Chat, is the major reason for its e-commerce conversions being 5–10 times higher than Douyin's.
14. Pinterest
Pinterest would not have made our top 15 social networking sites and apps a year ago. Between January and December of 2020, the image-sharing network enjoyed a record year of growth, attracting over 100 million new monthly active users.
Important information for firms trying to advertise themselves on Pinterest is that the social media network is still in its early stages outside of the United States.
The great majority of the social media platform's users (approximately 23 percent) are based in the United States as of January 2021. Germany is the next closest country, with 3.9 percent of the total. With 2.7 percent, France is third.
After making this point, it's worth noting that Pinterest's remarkable rise in 2020 was entirely attributable to greater worldwide usage.
In its Q4 financial report to shareholders, the business claimed a staggering 46 percent rise in foreign monthly active users (MAU). Domestically, the network had a relatively moderate rise of 11% new MAU during the same time period.
Pinterest is predominantly dominated by female users in terms of demographics. At the moment, the gender split is around 60/40 percent. However, the gender divide is closing, with the site forecasting a 50% rise in male users by 2020.
15. Reddit
Despite heavy competitors and continuous shakeups in the ranking, the "first page of the internet" manages to stay on our list.
For the niche-obsessed, Reddit is a paradise. Whatever your hobbies and passions are, you're almost certain to discover a community of like-minded people who will love, teach, and mock you.
Reddit, which was founded in 2005, is one of the oldest social networks on our list, as indicated by its eerie resemblance to old-school discussion forums. Reddit's capacity to recruit new users hasn't been harmed by this, as the platform has continuously maintained a year-over-year MAU growth rate of 30%.
In the United States, Reddit is popular, with 25% of people using the network to read and exchange information. Reddit.com is the 8th most popular website in the United States, with an average visit time of 20.06 minutes, comfortably longer than Amazon, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, and eBay.
The United States accounts for 50.8 percent of Reddit's desktop traffic, followed by the United Kingdom (7.85 percent) and Canada (7.76 percent). Australia (4.34 percent) is unable to compete for a place on the podium.
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