The number of active users - the total number of unique users actively registered on the platform – is the indicator we use to determine the size of a social network. It's a measure that's widely used in the tech world as a gauge of popularity, engagement, and growth.
The top 10 social networking sites and applications
1. Facebook – 2.74 Billion Active Users
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 humans connect with one another.
Since its inception in 2004, the organization has experienced mind-boggling growth despite its stormy early days and continuous affiliation with epic conflicts.
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 every second.
Despite its enormous popularity, Facebook is not the world's most visited website. Surprisingly, its 25.5 billion monthly views are second only to YouTube's 34.6 billion and well behind Google's 92.5 billion.
In comparison 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 favorite 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 networks proportion of this cohort increased from 15% to 27%.
2. YouTube – 2.291 Billion Active Users
YouTube, the second-most popular social media platform 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 figure may not be the most accurate reflection of the platform's genuine popularity.
The video-sharing network, which was founded in 2005, was originally intended 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 reaction, the site was opened up to all types of films – a decision that would make Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim multi-millionaires.
On its route to becoming not only the world's top video-sharing network but also the target of a $1.65 billion Google takeover, the firm surmounted several technical and legal challenges. All of this was accomplished by November 2006, barely 16 months after the company's official inception.
YouTube is also one of a small number of social media channels that reach 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.
3. WhatsApp – 2.0 Billion Active Users
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by two former Yahoo! workers with the intention of merely showing "statuses" next to the names of each entry in a user's contact book, rather than being an instant messaging (IM) service.
Alex Fishman, a friend of Jan Koum's, told Forbes, "At some point, it sort of became instant messaging."
This unintentional evolution propelled the program to the top of the free IM market, as well as making the founders extremely wealthy, courtesy of 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 rate 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 revenue strategy. However, this does not negate the app's immense marketing potential for firms that 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.
The number of active users - the total number of unique users actively registered on the platform – is the indicator we use to determine the size of a social network. It's a measure that's widely used in the tech world as a gauge of popularity, engagement, and growth.
4. Facebook Messenger – 1.3 Billion Active Users
The fact that 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 significantly outperform Messenger.
Messenger began as "Facebook Chat," a rudimentary instant messaging function that was introduced into 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 unique economic ecosystem.
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 interact 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 inquiries and sell items, as well as adverts placed in the user's inbox.
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:
5. Instagram – 1.221 Billion Active Users
With 1.22 billion active users worldwide, the world's most popular photo-sharing app ranks fifth.
Instagram was founded in 2009 by Kevin Systrom, a former Google employee, as the result of meticulous research of the social media scene at the time.
Systrom was able to turn the app, which was initially focused on recruiting whiskey and bourbon connoisseurs, into something wider thanks to an early round of seed money. Something with industry-leading image-altering technology and a social experience unlike any other image-sharing site at the time.
The end effect was a social network that was truly monstrous. Instagram had 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 milestones.
The emergence of "influencers" is one of Instagram's most enduring contributions to the world of digital marketing. For better or worse, certain users' popularity gave their accounts an "aspirational" tilt, which spawned a whole new marketing channel that allowed average people to profit from their celebrity.
Instagram's user base 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 site for B2C marketing, with more than 70% of businesses in the United States adopting it as a marketing channel. In comparison to its greatest competition, Facebook, Instagram has outstanding engagement rates. Instagram posts receive a 23 percent greater interaction rate than images uploaded on Facebook while having equal functionality and engagement mechanisms.
6. Weixin/WeChat – 1.213 Billion Active Users
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 everything from sending text messages and make video chats to make digital payments and play video games.
It's also a testament to WeChat's tremendous utility that the app has grown in popularity despite actively sharing users' private data with the Chinese government as part of the latter's vast monitoring and censorship operations.
Regardless of this terrible collaboration, WeChat has infiltrated practically every facet of Chinese life, as seen by the app's impressive 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. Over 60s who use WeChat spend more than half of their cellphone 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 – 689 Million Active Users
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 in the top five most downloaded applications in the world two years after it first appeared on the social media scene. It was number one a year later. And it wasn't by a small margin. By a remarkable 250 million downloads, the nascent social network surpassed its nearest competitor, WhatsApp.
For more information, look at the table below. The difference 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 – 617 Million Active Users
QQ is another of Tencent's properties (the other being WeChat), and it has been around for a long time (in internet years).
OICQ, a downloaded instant messaging program that was launched in 1999, swiftly became China's most popular digital contact platform and played a key role in the "death" of email in the world's most populous country.
The software's superior handling of file transfers aided QQ's early climb to prominence as a business communication platform. This generated a network effect, in which businesses just HAD to be on QQ because all of their partners, vendors, and clients were already there.
Being the first to market with such a beneficial platform, especially in a location where many external cloud-based programs are intentionally blocked, contributed to QQ's great success.
Despite its widespread use in China, QQ has yet to have an impact on the rest of the world. The platform's international versions were not integrated with many valuable QQ goods, making it essentially useless outside of its home area.
9. Douyin – 600 Million Active Users
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 apps aimed at two distinct audiences.
Douyin has become one of the most popular luxury marketing channels in China. Many have struggled to engage the platform's young user base in meaningful ways, although there have been some successes.
Unlike TikTok, Douyin has embraced user-monetization and provided content creators 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 – 511 Million Active Users
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 center that's been embraced by businesses, 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 was the most successful of them, winning Weibo's "most promising and popular outbound destination award" during a Chinese influencer summit in 2019.
Regrettably, the content shared on Weibo is subject to stringent government surveillance and control, as one might expect. However, this hasn't stopped international corporations from attempting to advertise themselves to a third of China's population.
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