Top 15 Social Media Sites and Apps by Active Users

Top 15 Social Media Sites and Apps by Active Users

Top 15 Social Media Sites and Apps

Social networking platforms are locked in a never-ending game of musical chairs.

Every year, the craze of a fickle public, the introduction of new players, and changing global trends alter social media's most important leaderboards.

In addition to these changes being "generally quite interesting" to industry watchers, they are also very useful for savvy digital marketers.

Knowing how deep each of these platforms reaches into the global online community is critical to your company's social media marketing strategy. As is understanding other nuances related to the development of the platform.

Choosing which social network your brand is going to focus its marketing efforts on is a very important decision and should not be taken purely on a swoop.

Sure, a particular social media platform may feel "right" for your brand, but we recommend that you keep a bunch of other variables in mind before leaping. Of these, "relative popularity" and "growth" are the two most important factors.

Top 15 Social Media Sites and Apps by Active Users

1. Facebook – 2.74 Billion Active Users

2. YouTube – 2.291 Billion Active Users

3. WhatsApp – 2.0 Billion Active Users

4. Facebook Messenger – 1.3 Billion Active Users

5. Instagram – 1.221 Billion Active Users

6. Weixin/WeChat – 1.213 Billion Active Users

7. TikTok – 689 Million Active Users

8. QQ – 617 Million Active Users

9. Douyin – 600 Million Active Users

10. Sina Weibo – 511 Million Active Users

11. Telegram – 500 Million Active Users

12. Snapchat – 498 Million Active Users

13. Kuaishou – 481 Million Active Users

14. Pinterest – 442 Million Active Users

15. Reddit – 430 Million Active Users

1. Facebook – 2.74 Billion Active Users

Facebook is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the social media platform.

While it may not take the credit for starting it all, that honor goes to SixDegree (RIP), the social media juggernaut that not only showed the world what the Internet could be but was fundamentally one of human beings- It also changes the way you interact with others.

The company's turbulent early days and relentless engagement with epic controversies haven't stopped it from gaining mindfulness since its 2004 launch.

It only took ten months for Facebook to reach one million subscribers and only eight years to reach one billion. As of February 2021, Facebook has 2.74 billion active users - a number that grows to about 500,000 new users every day, or six new users every second.

Despite its immense popularity, Facebook is not the most visited website in the world. Somewhat surprisingly, its 25.5 billion monthly visits have been eclipsed by YouTube's 34.6 billion and Google's 92.5 billion.

Compared to other social media platforms, Facebook is most popular among users aged 12 to 34, although their US-based share of this demographic is certainly shrinking.

The Infinite Dial reports that 58% of survey respondents in this age group identified Facebook as their favorite social network in 2015. In 2020 it has come down to 32%. The biggest culprit - Instagram. The photo and video-sharing social network saw the share of this demographic range from 15% to 27% at the same time.

Here are some other interesting facts about using Facebook:

India is the country with the most active Facebook users (290 million), the US second (190 million), and Indonesia third (140 million).

In the US, 73% of all Facebook users log in daily. 93% use Facebook weekly, and 98% log in at least once a month.

Despite continued criticism of Facebook's role in spreading propaganda, 36% of US citizens say they regularly use the platform as a source of news.

The average American user spends up to 38 minutes a day on Facebook.

2. YouTube – 2.291 Billion Active Users

The second most popular social media platform on our list, YouTube comes with a super-impressive 2.29 billion registered users.

However, since anyone can enjoy YouTube content, regardless of whether they are registered users or not, this figure may not be the most accurate representation of the platform's actual popularity.

Launched in 2005, the video-sharing platform was initially intended to be a dating service, with the founders reportedly publishing ads on Craigslist to encourage women to post videos of themselves talking about their ideal partners. To tempt.

The (rather understandable) lack of response resulted in the site being opened to videos of any kinda decision that would eventually make Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim multi-millionaires.

The company not only overcame many technical and legal hurdles on its way to becoming the world's leading video-sharing platform but also targeted a $1.65 billion acquisition by Google. All this as of November 2006 - only 16 months after its official launch.

YouTube is also one of a small selection of social media platforms that reach a very young age group. A 2020 study conducted by Pew Research revealed the following about the viewing habits of American children under the age of 11.

80% of parents say their kids watch YouTube videos.

Only 19% of parents say their kids don't watch YouTube videos.

More than half of parents said that their children watch Youtube at least once a day.

Parents' thoughts about YouTube

Despite its popularity among younger audiences, YouTube also boasts some notable figures for reaching the adult demographic. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of all adults in the US use YouTube. Facebook is second with 68% and Instagram is third with 40%.

When it comes to national demographics, over 30% of YouTube's traffic comes from just three countries. At 16.4%, the United States contributes the largest percentage. India won the bronze with 9.2% and Japan with 4.8%.

3. WhatsApp – 2.0 Billion Active Users

In 2009 two former Yahoo! Employees, WhatsApp's original goal was not an instant messaging (IM) app, but to show "status" next to the name of each entry in a user's address book.

“At some point, it became instant messaging,” Alex Fishman, a friend of founder Jan Koum, told Forbes.

This sudden development propelled the app to dominate the free IM market and would make founders extremely wealthy – later thanks to Facebook's $16 billion acquisition in 2014.

WhatsApp is one of only three social networking platforms with a user base of over 2 billion - a milestone they reached by 2020. The app's recent growth rate has been astonishing, with the last billion users growing in just over four years!

Since WhatsApp has opted to integrate traditional advertising into its revenue model, the platform does not offer the breadth of marketing options that many other social networks do. But that doesn't mean the app doesn't provide immense marketing value for businesses that use it as a communication tool.

Despite the recent PR mayhem surrounding a misadvised update to its privacy policy, WhatsApp is still the most popular mobile messaging app on Earth, surpassing Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ, Telegram, and Snapchat in the title.

4. Facebook Messenger – 1.3 Billion Active Users

It says a lot about the power of Facebook that service within their main platform jumped to number four on this coveted list.

It also says a lot about WhatsApp that they were able to dramatically outperform Messenger even though it was embedded in the world's most popular social network.

An early incarnation of Messenger was "Facebook Chat" - a simple IM feature that was launched in the Facebook environment in 2008. Seeing Chat's potential as a standalone app with its unique commercial ecosystem, Facebook overhauled the service and rebranded it as "Facebook Messenger" two years later.

Unlike WhatsApp, Messenger owners had no problem introducing monetization features into the core functionality of the app. As a result, Messenger provides businesses with an unparalleled level of interaction with their customers and prospects.

There are more ways you can interact with your leads on Messenger than you can just wiggle the stick. From automated chatbots that field incoming queries and promote products, to ads displayed in a user's inbox, Messenger is a B2C marketer's dream.

Facebook happily reports that more than 40 million active businesses use Messenger to interact with their potential customers and that more than 20 billion messages are sent between businesses and regular users each month.

Interestingly, Messenger still lags behind WhatsApp in terms of the total number of global active users, with Messenger comfortably being the more popular choice among users in the United States.

Statista's most recent data on US IM engagement revealed that 12.1% of US mobile owners were using WhatsApp, compared to 56.8% of Messenger.

Age-wise, there is one group that ranks above the rest when it comes to the adoption of Facebook Messenger in the United States:

Adoption of Facebook Messenger in the United States

13 to 17-year-olds account for 1.7% of the app usage.

18-24-year-olds account for 14.7%.

Children ages 25 - 34 represent 27.3% of Messenger's US user base.

35 - 44-year-olds come in second with 21%.

The 45 - 51-year-olds account for 14.7% of the country's Messenger user base.

5. Instagram – 1.221 Billion Active Users

The world's most popular photo-sharing app comes in at number 5 with a total of 1.22 billion global active users.

Founded in 2009 by former Google employee, Kevin Systrom, Instagram is the product of an incredibly diligent analysis of the social media landscape of the time.

The initial round of seed funding allowed Systrom to pivot the app, which initially focused on attracting whiskey and bourbon aficionados into something broader. Something with industry-defined image manipulation technology and a far more immersive social experience than any other image-sharing service of the time.

The result was an absolute beast of a social network. By April 2012, the month Facebook acquired it for $1 billion, Instagram had grown its user base to 35 million. Three months later, it had 80 million users. By June 2016, it reached the historical figure of 500 million.

One of Instagram's most enduring contributions to the world of digital marketing was the creation of "influencers". For better or worse, the popularity of some users caused their profiles to skew an "aspirant", which soon resulted in the birth of a new marketing channel that empowered regular people to monetize their fame.

Demographically, Instagram primarily appeals to users under the age of 35, with 71% of the app's user base falling into this category.

It is also an extremely popular platform for B2C marketing, with over 70% of US businesses actively using it as a marketing channel. Instagram offers incredible engagement rates compared to its biggest competitor, Facebook. Instagram posts see an average 23% higher engagement rate than images published on Facebook, despite offering relatively similar functionality and engagement mechanisms.

With 140 million users each, the US and India represent the platform's two largest national demographics. Brazil (99 million) are second and Indonesia (88 million) third, while Russia (56 million) missed out on a podium finish.

6. Weixin/WeChat – 1.213 Billion Active Users

With an incredibly wide range of features that allow users to do everything from sending text messages and making video calls to processing digital payments and playing video games, it's no wonder that WeChat ranks so high on our list. high position.

It is also a testament to the immense usefulness of WeChat that the app achieved this level of popularity despite actively sharing users' private information with the Chinese government as part of subsequent mass surveillance and censorship efforts.

Despite this unfortunate association, WeChat has made its way into almost every aspect of Chinese life – a belief underpinned by the fact that adoption of the app by older age groups is hugely influential.

An astonishing 98.5% of Chinese mobile users between the ages of 50 and 80 are registered WeChat users in 2018. While 60% of WeChat users over the age of 60 use more than half of their mobile data on the app.

Looking at WeChat as a potential marketing channel for social media marketers in the US, it is useful to know that 23% of US mobile internet users are registered on the app between the ages of 18 and 24.

7. TikTok – 689 Million Active Users

There are overnight success stories and then there is TikTok. The video-sharing platform burst onto the international scene in 2017 and quickly began racking up adoption figures, leaving competitors crying at their keyboards.

Two years after it emerged on the social media landscape, TikTok was among the top five most downloaded apps in the world. A year later, it was number one. And not even by a small margin. The budding social network surpassed its nearest rival, WhatsApp, with a staggering 250 million downloads.

Take a look at the table below for some more reference. There is only a difference of 60 million downloads between WhatsApp and third-ranked Facebook!

Most downloaded apps in the world

TikTok still has a way of catching up with its competitors in terms of the breadth of its demographic reach. In the United States, 47% of the platform's user base is between the ages of 10 and 29.

8. QQ – 617 Million Active Users

Another asset owned by Chinese conglomerate Tencent (the other is WeChat), QQ has been around forever (in the Internet years).

Launched in 1999 as a downloadable instant messaging service under the name OICQ, the platform quickly became China's most popular digital contact platform and was instrumental in "killing" email in the world's most populous country.

The early rise of QQ's dominance as a business communications platform was facilitated by the software's exceptional handling of file transfers. This created a network effect where companies only had to be on QQ because, all their partners, vendors, and customers were already using it.

Being the first to market with such a useful platform, especially in an area that actively blocks many external cloud-based apps, helped build the foundation for QQ's massive success.

Despite its ubiquity in China, QQ has not managed to make a mark in the rest of the world. International versions of the platform were not integrated with many valuable QQ products, making it mostly useless outside its home region.

9. Douyin – 600 Million Active Users

To keep it simple, Douyin is TikTok for a Chinese audience. The two platforms have the same parent company and the same core functionality but are of course two different apps, marketed to two different demographics.

In China, Douyin has become one of the most popular marketing channels for luxury brands. Many have struggled to build meaningful engagement with the platform's young user base, but there have been some success stories as well.

Unlike TikTok, Douyin has embraced user-monetization and provided a more concrete mechanism for content creators to generate revenue streams from their videos – primarily by integrating with popular Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Taobao.

10. Sina Weibo – 511 Million Active Users

Sina Weibo is a Chinese property that started as a micro-blogging site and has grown into the third-largest social network in the country.

Unlike the other Chinese platforms on this list, Weibo's focus is heavily on the creation, distribution, and consumption of user-generated content. It is an information hub that has been adopted by businesses, journalists, influencers, and regular people alike.

While companies, in particular, have taken to Weibo as a marketing platform, many international brands have even been able to tap into the massive Chinese market. The most successful of these has been Tourism Australia which won Weibo's "Most Promising and Popular Outbound Destination Award" at a Chinese influential summit in 2019.

Sadly, as might be expected, the information distributed on Weibo is subject to strict government scrutiny and censorship. But that hasn't deterred continued efforts by foreign companies to market themselves to a third of China's population.

11. Telegram – 500 Million Active Users

No social network with an instant messaging focus has benefited more from WhatsApp's recent PR disaster than Telegram. When WhatsApp announced the impending changes to its privacy policy, the effects were immediate.

A large number of users left the Facebook-owned chat app – most of them trading it for Telegram, a hyper-secure IM and social networking app favored by blockchain enthusiasts and cryptocurrency traders.

The Guardian reports (via data sourced from App Annie) that between January 1 and January 12 of 2021, WhatsApp fell from the 8th most downloaded app in the UK to 23rd.

During roughly the same time (January 1 - January 21), Telegram gained about 25 million new users. This is a 5% increase in their user base in just three weeks! It became the world's most downloaded app for both Android and iPhone users in a month that WhatsApp will forget.

From the graph above, it is very clear that the adoption of Telegram saw a huge increase between March 2018 and January 2021. During these three years, the app saw a 150% increase in its monthly active users - from 200 million to 500 million users. 34 months only.

According to data published by Hootsuite, Android Telegram users spend more time on the app than those using Facebook Messenger. Social media experts report that the average user spends 2.9 hours per month on Telegram, versus Messenger 2.7.

12. Snapchat – 498 Million Active Users

Some might have speculated that the app that defines the notion of "once it's on the Internet, it's forever" would elevate the way Snapchat does.

The photo and video-sharing platform became famous for only displaying users' posts for a limited amount of time before they were deleted. Always. It imbued every Snapchat interaction with an urgency that resonated with a younger generation of mobile Internet users.

It also helped that the app broke the mold when it came to augmented reality filters and lenses — features that fuel Snapchat interactions with a creative irresistibility missing from other social networks.

Snapchat has shown some seriously impressive growth in its daily active users (DAUs) outside the United States and Europe.

In the four years between Q4, 2017 and Q4, 2020, app usage in these two regions has maintained a steady rate of growth. However, DAUs in the rest of the world has increased from 47 million to 99 million in this time frame.

As of December 2020, Snapchat DAUs have now surpassed their US and European counterparts in the "rest of the world".

From a demographic point of view, two statistics stand out:

59% of all US Internet users between the ages of 13 and 24 are on Snapchat.

Since 2016, Snapchat has been the most popular social network among teenagers and young adults.

13. Kuaishou - 481 million active users

China's 1.5 billion people prefer video-sharing and live to stream. So much so, that we find ourselves talking about a second-of-its-kind app that focuses exclusively on the Chinese market.

Kuaishou is the region's second-largest video-sharing social network, currently sitting with about 80% of Douyin's total active users.

Functionally, it offers very similar features to Douyin, but there are significant differences in the type of content created by the two networks and the way it is curated and displayed.

Kuaishou is the more popular platform for live streaming, with double the number of live streams in its local content section than Douyin.

Kuaishou has a strong relationship-driven approach to content recommendation. About half of the content in a user's feed comes from accounts the user already follows.

The vast majority (up to 90%) of the content displayed on a Douyin user's feed is from accounts gaining popularity among other users.

Chinese social media expert, Walk the Chat, believes that Kuaishou's strong community focus is the main reason why it boasts of e-commerce conversions that are 5-10x higher than Douyin.

14. Pinterest – 442 Million Active Users

Until a year ago, Pinterest might not have made it to our list of the 15 most popular social networking sites and apps. The image-sharing platform saw record growth in 2020, gaining more than 100 million new monthly active users between January and December.

Important information for brands looking to promote themselves on Pinterest is that the social media platform is only now starting to make a mark outside of the United States.

As of January 2021, the vast majority (about 23%) of the social media platform's users find themselves in the US. The next closest region is Germany which is only 3.9%. France ranks third with 2.7%

Having made this point, it is important to note that the incredible growth that Pinterest experienced in 2020 was largely due to the increase in international adoption.

Speaking to shareholders in its Q4 earnings report, the company announced that it has seen an astonishing 46% growth in international monthly active users (MAUs). During the same period, the network saw a more modest domestic growth of 11% new MAUs.

Demographically, Pinterest has been largely dominated by female users. Currently, the gender divide is sitting at around 60/40 percent. Although that gap is narrowing, however, the platform has reported a 50% increase in male users in 2020.

15. Reddit – 430 Million Active Users

Appropriately, "The Front Page of the Internet" manages to stay on our list despite some strong opposition and several shakeups in the leaderboards.

Reddit is a haven for the niche-obsessed. No matter what your interests are and where are your passions, you're guaranteed to have a like-minded community ready to embrace, educate, and make fun of you.

Founded in 2005, Reddit is one of the oldest social networks on our list, a fact evidenced by its uncanny resemblance to old-school discussion forums. This hasn't hurt the platform's ability to consistently attract new users, however, as Reddit has maintained a consistent year-over-year MAU growth of 30%.

Reddit thrives in the US, where 25% of the country's adults actively use the platform to read and share information. Reddit.com is currently ranked as the 8th most popular website in the country and has an average travel duration of 20.06 minutes – comfortably longer than Amazon, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, and eBay.

50.8% of Reddit's desktop traffic comes from the US, with the UK (7.85%) and Canada (7.76%) taking the next two spots. Australia (4.34%) missed out on the podium.

Currently, Reddit has just over 2.2 million subreddits. These are largely independent communities that exist with minimal restraint and interference from the platform itself. This autonomy has played a big part in the success of Reddit. Users can build thriving communities around some very obscure topics – something that generates fierce loyalty to a platform.

Conclusion

you go there 15 most popular social networking sites and apps. Raise your hand if you never thought we'd reach the end of this huge list.

In all seriousness, knowing as much as possible before you start promoting your brand on a platform is vital to the success of social media marketing.

Different functions and features make some platforms more suitable for one brand than another. At the same time, different heritages and cultures also attract specific audience demographics.

Build solid insight into all of these variables and your next social media campaign is more likely to show the returns your business deserves.