The 15 Biggest Social Media Sites and Apps 2023

The 15 Biggest Social Media Sites and Apps 2023

Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites and Apps
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Social networking systems are locked in a never-ending game of musical chairs.

Every year, the whims of a fickle public, the advent of latest players, and shifting international developments cause a shuffle in social media’s most important leaderboard.

Aside from those shifts just being “usually quite interesting” to enterprise watchers, they’re additionally terrific useful for savvy virtual marketers.

Knowing how deeply each of those platforms reaches into the global on line community is essential to your company’s social media advertising strategy. As is knowing other nuances referring to the platform’s boom.

Choosing which social network your logo goes to recognition its advertising efforts on is a completely critical choice, and one which shouldn’t be taken in simple terms on a hunch.

Sure, a selected social media platform may additionally “sense proper” for your logo, but we propose that you take a bunch of other variables into attention before making the jump. Amongst these, “relative recognition” and “growth” are two of the maximum important elements.

So, to assist your brand with this crucial decision, Dreamgrow keeps this submit: An updated view at the movers, shakers, freshmen, and immovable monoliths that make up the social media panorama.

Let’s leap in.

The Top 15 Social Media Sites and Apps through Active Users
A Closer Look at the Top 15 Social Networks

1. Facebook – 2.74 Billion Active Users
2. YouTube – 2.291 Billion Active Users
3. WhatsApp – 2.Zero Billion Active Users
   four. Facebook Messenger – 1.3 Billion Active Users
   five. Instagram – 1.221 Billion Active Users
4. Weixin/WeChat – 1.213 Billion Active Users
5. TikTok – 689 Million Active Users
   eight. QQ – 617 Million Active Users
6. Douyin – six hundred Million Active Users
7. Sina Weibo – 511 Million Active Users
8. Telegram – 500 Million Active Users
9. Snapchat – 498 Million Active Users
   thirteen. Kuaishou – 481 Million Active Users
10. Pinterest – 442 Million Active Users
11. Reddit – 430 Million Active Users
    In Conclusion
    The Top 15 Social Media Sites and Apps by way of Active Users
    The metric we use to decide a social community’s length is “variety of lively customers” – the full quantity of unique customers currently registered on the platform. It’s a metric that’s used in the course of the tech industry as a key indicator of popularity, engagement, and increase.

Below is a graph depicting the pinnacle 15 social networking web sites and apps as calculated with the aid of enterprise-main issuer of enterprise data, Statista.

Top 15 Social Networking Sites and Apps through Active Users

A Closer Look at the Top 15 Social Networks

1. Facebook – 2.Seventy four Billion Active Users
   Facebook is the undisputed heavyweight champion of social media structures.

While it is able to’t take credit score for buying the entirety started out, that honor is going to SixDegrees (RIP), Facebook is the social media juggernaut that now not best showed the arena what the net may be, however additionally basically modified the manner humans interact with every different.

The enterprise’s turbulent early days and persisted affiliation with epic controversies haven’t stopped it from achieving thoughts-boggling boom in view that its 2004 release.

Facebook maintains on growing

It took Facebook only ten months to attain one million subscribers and only 8 years to reach 1000000000. As of January 2023, Facebook boasts 2.74 billion energetic users – a variety of that grows with roughly 500,000 new customers every day, or six new customers each 2nd.

Despite its gigantic popularity, Facebook isn’t the maximum visited website in the global. Somewhat particularly, its 25.5 billion monthly visits are bested via YouTube’s 34.6 billion and absolutely eclipsed through Google’s 92.5 billion.

In contrast to other social media structures, Facebook is the maximum famous amongst users elderly between 12 and 34 years, even though their US-primarily based percentage of this demographic is most truely shrinking.

The Infinite Dial reviews that the fifty eight% of survey respondents in this age group who identified Facebook as their favorite social network in 2015 has contracted to 32% in 2020. The biggest wrongdoer – Instagram. The image and video-sharing social network saw its share of this demographic pass from 15% to 27% in the identical term.

Here are some different exciting data approximately Facebook usage:

India is the u . S . With the maximum energetic Facebook customers (290 million), the United States is 2nd (one hundred ninety million), and Indonesia 1/3 (one hundred forty million).
In the United States, seventy three% of all Facebook users log in on a every day basis. 93% use Facebook weekly, and ninety eight% log in at least once a month.
Despite persevered grievance of Facebook’s role in spreading disinformation, 36% of US citizens say they often use the platform as a source of information.
The average American person spends as much as 38 minutes according to day on Facebook.

2. YouTube – 2.291 Billion Active Users
   The 2d-maximum popular social media platform on our listing, YouTube comes in at a superb-magnificent 2.29 billion registered users.

However, due to the fact that ANYONE can experience YouTube content, regardless of whether or not or not they’re a registered consumer, this figure might not be the maximum accurate representation of the platform’s actual recognition.

Launched in 2005, the video-sharing platform changed into initially meant to be a courting carrier, with the founders reportedly publishing advertisements on Craigslist to trap women into posting motion pictures of themselves speakme about their ideal partners.

The (as a substitute understandable) loss of reaction resulted in the web site being opened up for movies of any kind – a decision that might in the end make Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim multi-millionaires.

The corporation overcame severa technical and felony obstacles on its way to becoming no longer best the sector’s leading video-sharing platform but additionally the target of a $1.Sixty five billion acquisition by Google. All of this via November 2006 – handiest 16 months after its official launch.

YouTube is also one in all a tiny selection of social media systems that reaches very younger age agencies. A 2020 observe performed via Pew Research discovered the following about the viewing conduct of US kids under the age of 11.

Eighty% of dad and mom say their children watch YouTube movies.
Only 19% of parents say that their youngsters don’t watch YouTube motion pictures.
More than half of dad and mom said their kids watched Youtube at the least once a day.
Parents Views About YouTube

Despite its recognition amongst a more youthful target market, YouTube additionally boasts a few exceptional stats for reaching the person demographic. Almost 3-quarters (seventy four%) of all adults within the US use YouTube. Facebook is available in 2d at sixty eight% and Instagram is third with forty%.

When it comes to national demographics, more than 30% of all YouTube’s traffic originates from most effective 3 nations. At 16.4%, the US contributes the biggest percent. India is 2d with 9.2% and Japan grabs the bronze with four.8%.

3. WhatsApp – 2.Zero Billion Active Users
   Founded in 2009 via two former Yahoo! Personnel, WhatsApp’s authentic goal wasn’t to be an instantaneous messaging (IM) app, however instead to surely display “statuses” next to the names of each entry in a person’s address book.

“At a few point it kind of became instantaneous messaging,” Alex Fishman, a friend of founder, Jan Koum, informed Forbes.

This unintended evolution caused the app dominating the free IM marketplace and could additionally grow to be making the founders immensely wealthy – the latter thanks to Facebook’s $sixteen billion acquisition in 2014.

WhatsApp is one in all handiest 3 social networking systems with a user base of over 2 billion – a milestone they reached in 2020. The app’s recent boom charge has been superb, with the final billion users hopping on in handiest 4 years!

WhatsApp 2021 User Statistics

Because WhatsApp has resisted integrating traditional advertising and marketing into their revenue version, the platform doesn’t provide the width of advertising alternatives that many other social networks do. But that doesn’t imply that the app doesn’t provide substantial marketing fee for groups who use it as a communications device.

Despite a current PR catastrophe surrounding an sick-advised replace to their privacy policy, WhatsApp is still the most popular cell messaging app on the earth, beating Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ, Telegram, and Snapchat to the name.

4. Facebook Messenger – 1.Three Billion Active Users
   It says a lot approximately the strength of Facebook that a carrier WITHIN their most important platform reached the range 4 spot in this prestigious list.

It additionally says a lot about WhatsApp that they had been able to dramatically outperform Messenger in spite of the latter being embedded into the world’s most popular social network.

A Facebook’s messenger chatbot in motion

Messenger’s preliminary incarnation turned into “Facebook Chat” – a simple IM feature that changed into launched into the Facebook environment in 2008. Noting Chat’s ability as a standalone app with its personal particular business surroundings, Facebook overhauled the provider and rebranded it as “Facebook Messenger” two years later.

Unlike WhatsApp, Messenger’s owners had no difficulty with introducing monetization capabilities into the app’s middle capability. As a end result, Messenger offers groups an extraordinary stage of touch with their customers and potentialities.

There are greater approaches to interact together with your leads on Messenger than you can shake a stick at. From computerized chatbots that subject incoming queries and promote merchandise, to advertisements displayed inside the person’s inbox, Messenger is a B2C marketer’s dream.

Facebook gleefully reviews that over forty million active groups use Messenger to have interaction with their capability customers and that over 20 billion messages are sent among organizations and ordinary customers every month.

Interestingly, at the same time as Messenger still lags at the back of WhatsApp in terms of overall quantity of worldwide active customers, Messenger is easily the extra popular preference among users within the United States.

Statista’s maximum current figures on US IM engagement suggested that 12.1% of US mobile proprietors have been using WhatsApp, in comparison to Messenger’s fifty six.Eight%.

Age-sensible, there’s one group that towers above the relaxation when it comes to Facebook Messenger adoption inside the United States:

Facebook Messenger Adoption In The United State

thirteen – 17-year olds account for 1.7% of the app’s utilization.
18 – 24-year olds account for 14.7%.
25 – 34-12 months olds represent 27.3% of Messenger’s US person base.
35 – 44-12 months olds are available 2d with 21%.
Forty five – fifty one year olds account for 14.7% of the u . S . A .’s Messenger’s user base.
Five. Instagram – 1.221 Billion Active Users
The global’s most famous photo-sharing app is available in at variety five with a total of 1.22 billion global lively users.

Founded by using former Google employee, Kevin Systrom, in 2009, Instagram is the manufactured from an incredibly diligent evaluation of the social media panorama on the time.

An early round of seed investment allowed Systrom to pivot the app, which initially targeted on attracting whiskey and bourbon aficionados, into some thing broader. Something with industry-defining photo manipulation tech and a miles extra immersive social experience than every other photo-sharing provider on the time.

The result become an absolute beast of a social network. By April 2012, the month Facebook received it for $1 billion, Instagram had grown its user base to 35 million. Three months later, it stood at 80 million customers. By June 2016, it reached the landmark 500 million determine.

One of Instagram’s most enduring contributions to the arena of digital marketing was the creation of “influencers”. For better or worse, positive users’ reputation gave their profiles an “aspirational” slant, which quickly resulted inside the delivery of an entire new advertising channel that empowered normal folks to monetize their repute.

Demographically, Instagram appeals usually to users beneath the age of 35, with seventy one% of the app’s consumer base falling into this category.

It’s also an immensely famous platform for B2C advertising, with greater than 70% of US corporations actively the usage of it as a advertising channel. Instagram gives superb engagement quotes in contrast to Facebook, its largest competitor. Despite imparting quite comparable functionality and engagement mechanisms, Instagram posts see, on common, a 23% better engagement charge than pics posted on Facebook.

At one hundred forty million customers every, the United States and India constitute the platform’s two largest country wide demographics. Brazil (99 million) is ranked 2d and Indonesia (88 million) 0.33, at the same time as Russia (fifty six million) misses out on a podium end.

Leading Countries Based On Instagram Audience Size As Of January 2021

6. Weixin/WeChat – 1.213 Billion Active Users
   With an exceptionally huge variety of capabilities that permit customers to do the entirety from sending textual content messages and carrying out video calls to processing virtual bills and gambling video video games, it’s no marvel that WeChat has this sort of excessive role on our list.

Number of Monthly Active Pinterest Users Worldwide 2020

It’s additionally a testament to WeChat’s mammoth usefulness that the app performed this stage of recognition in spite of actively sharing users’ private records with the Chinese authorities as part of the latter’s mass surveillance and censorship efforts.

Regardless of this unlucky collaboration, WeChat has blasted its manner into clearly each component of Chinese existence – a perception underscored by way of the truth that the app’s adoption by means of older age groups is extremely superb.

In 2018 an spectacular 98.Five% of Chinese mobile users among the ages of 50 and 80 are registered WeChat customers. While 60% of WeChat users over the age of 60 use extra than 1/2 in their cellular facts at the app.

For social media entrepreneurs in the US considering WeChat as a possible advertising channel, it’s useful to understand that 23% of America’s cell internet customers between the ages of 18 and 24 are registered on the app.

7. TikTok – 689 Million Active Users
   There are in a single day achievement stories and then there is TikTok. The video-sharing platform burst onto the global scene in 2017 and fast started out racking up adoption figures that made competitors weep onto their keyboards.

Two years after its emergence onto the social media landscape, TikTok became in the pinnacle 5 of the world’s maximum downloaded apps. A 12 months later, it was number one. And now not by using a small margin, both. The fledgling social network outperformed its nearest rival, WhatsApp, via a astounding 250 million downloads.

Have a look at the desk beneath for some more context. The difference between WhatsApp and the 1/3-placed Facebook is handiest 60 million downloads!

The World’s Most Dowloaded Apps

TikTok nevertheless has some distance to go to seize up with its competitors in phrases of the breadth of its demographic attain. In the United States, forty seven% of the platform’s person base is among the a long time of 10 and 29.

8. QQ – 617 Million Active Users
   Another property owned by the Chinese conglomerate Tencent (the other is WeChat), QQ has been round forever (in internet years).

Launched under the name OICQ in 1999 as a downloadable on the spot messaging carrier, the platform quickly have become China’s maximum popular digital contact platform and performed a pivotal function in “killing” electronic mail inside the global’s maximum populous u . S . A ..

QQ’s early rise to dominance as a commercial enterprise conversation platform was helped with the aid of the software’s wonderful dealing with of document transfers. This created a community impact in which companies really HAD to be on QQ due to the fact, nicely, all their companions, carriers, and customers were already using it.

Being first to marketplace with the sort of useful platform, in particular in a territory that actively blocks so many outside cloud-based totally apps, helped construct the foundation for QQ’s giant fulfillment.

Despite its ubiquity in China, QQ hasn’t controlled to make its mark on the rest of the arena. International versions of the platform weren’t included with many valuable QQ products, rendering it by and large valueless outside its domestic territory.

Number of Monthly Active QQ Users Worldwide

9. Douyin – six hundred Million Active Users
   To keep it simple, Douyin is TikTok for a Chinese target market. The platforms have the equal figure business enterprise and the same center functionality however are most sincerely two special apps, advertised to 2 exceptional demographics.

In China, Douyin has end up one of the most famous marketing channels for luxury manufacturers. Many have struggled to create meaningful engagement with the platform’s young user base, however there have been some achievement tales.

Unlike TikTok, Douyin has embraced user-monetization and supplied content material creators with greater concrete mechanisms to generate sales flow from their videos – in particular by using integrating with popular Chinese e-commerce structures like Taobao.

Number of Daily Active Users Of Douyin (Tiktok) In China From January 2019 To August 2020

10. Sina Weibo – 511 Million Active Users
    Sina Weibo is a Chinese property that began out as a micro-running a blog website and has developed into the us of a’s third-biggest social network.

Unlike the other Chinese platforms on this list, Weibo’s consciousness could be very an awful lot at the advent, delivery, and intake of consumer-generated content material. It’s an data center that’s been adopted with the aid of agencies, newshounds, influencers, and regular folks alike.

Companies, in particular, have taken to Weibo as a marketing platform, with several global brands even succeeding in tapping into the massive Chinese marketplace. The maximum successful of those has been Tourism Australia who won Weibo’s “maximum promising and popular outbound destination award” at a Chinese influencer summit in 2019.

Sadly, as may be anticipated, the information that’s distributed on Weibo is problem to strict authorities scrutiny and censorship. But this hasn’t stopped continued efforts through foreign agencies looking to marketplace themselves to a 3rd of China’s population.

Weibo Users 2021

eleven. Telegram – 500 Million Active Users
No social network with an immediately messaging consciousness has benefited more from WhatsApp’s recent PR disaster than Telegram. When WhatsApp announced approaching changes in their privacy policy, the ramifications have been instantaneous.

Users left the Facebook-owned chat app in droves – most of the people of them buying and selling it for Telegram, a hyper-at ease IM and social networking app desired by blockchain fans and cryptocurrency investors.

The Guardian reviews (through records received from App Annie) that among January 1 and January 12 of 2021, WhatsApp had fallen from the eighth most downloaded app inside the UK to the lowly position of twenty third.

During more or less the equal time frame (January 1 – January 21), Telegram gained about 25 million new customers. That’s a five% boom of their user base in just three weeks! It additionally became the arena’s most downloaded app for both Android and iPhone users throughout a month that WhatsApp might as a substitute neglect.

Telegram Users Over Time

From the graph above, it’s very clean that Telegram’s adoption noticed a huge increase among March 2018 and January 2021. During these three years, the app saw its month-to-month lively customers grow by a remarkable 150% – going from 2 hundred million to 500 million customers in best 34 months.

According to information posted by Hootsuite, Android Telegram users spend greater time on the app than those the usage of Facebook Messenger. The social media experts document that the common user spends 2.9 hours in keeping with month on Telegram, vs Messenger’s 2.7.

12. Snapchat – 498 Million Active Users
    Few humans would have guessed that an app rejecting the belief of “once it’s at the net, it’s forever” would thrive the way Snapchat has.

The photo and video-sharing platform have become famous for only displaying customers’ posts for a constrained time earlier than it’s deleted. Forever. This infused every Snapchat interaction with an immediacy that resonated with a more youthful technology of cellular internet users.

It additionally helped that the app broke the mildew while it got here to augmented fact filters and lenses – capabilities that instilled Snapchat interactions with a creative irreverence missing from different social networks.

Number of Daily Active Snapchar Users From 1st Quarter 2014 to 1st Quarter 2021, via Region

Snapchat has proven a few seriously astonishing boom in its every day energetic customers (DAU) out of doors of the USA and Europe.

In the 4 years between Q4, 2017 and Q4, 2020, the app’s utilization in those two areas has maintained a regular rate of growth. DAUs in the rest of the world, however, have skyrocketed on this time-frame, going from 47 million to a whopping ninety nine million.

As of December 2020, Snapchat DAUs in the “relaxation of the arena” now outnumber their US and European opposite numbers.

From a demographic attitude, two information stand out:

fifty nine% of all US net customers between the a while of 13 to 24 are on Snapchat.
Since 2016, Snapchat has been the maximum famous social network amongst young adults and young adults.

13. Kuaishou – 481 Million Active Users
    China’s 1.5 billion humans absolutely love video-sharing and live streaming. So a whole lot, in fact, that we discover ourselves speaking about the second app of its type that’s targeted solely on the Chinese marketplace.

Kuaishou is the territory’s 2d-largest video-sharing social network, currently sitting with round eighty% of Douyin’s general energetic users.

Functionally, it gives very comparable features to Douyin, however there are key variations in the form of content material the two networks create and how it is curated and displayed.

Kuaishou is the extra popular platform for live streaming, serving double the quantity of stay streams in its neighborhood content material section than Douyin.
Kuaishou has a more potent dating-pushed approach to content material recommendation. Around half of the content in a consumer’s feed comes from accounts the person already follows.
The widespread majority (as much as 90%) of content displayed on a Douyin person’s feed is from money owed which have received recognition amongst other users.
Chinese social media specialists, Walk the Chat, believe that Kuaishou’s stronger community recognition is the main reason why it boasts e-trade conversions that are 5 – 10 times better than Douyin’s.

Kuaishou’s Daily Active Users

14. Pinterest – 442 Million Active Users
    As little as a year in the past, Pinterest wouldn’t have made it onto our listing of the 15 maximum popular social networking websites and apps. The photograph-sharing platform saw a report growth yr in 2020, gaining more than a hundred million new monthly active customers among January and December.

Important information for manufacturers seeking to sell themselves on Pinterest is that the social media platform is most effective now starting to make its mark out of doors of the US.

As of January 2021, the sizeable majority (roughly 23%) of the social media platform’s users all locate themselves in the US. The subsequent closest territory is Germany which accounts for an insignificant 3.9%. France is 0.33 with 2.7%

Number of Monthly Active Pinterest Users Worldwide 2020

Having made this factor, it’s critical to observe that the super boom Pinterest skilled in 2020 changed into in large part because of improved global adoption.

Speaking to shareholders in their Q4 earnings document, the organisation announced that it saw an dazzling 46% boom in international monthly active customers (MAU). During the equal period, the network saw a greater modest home increase of eleven% new MAU.

Demographically, Pinterest has largely been dominated with the aid of lady customers. Currently, the gender split is sitting at about 60/40 percent. This hole is narrowing, however, with the platform reporting a 50% growth in male users in 2020.

15. Reddit – 430 Million Active Users
    Fittingly, the “front web page of the net” manages to remain on our list regardless of a few sturdy competition and numerous shakeups inside the leaderboard.

Reddit is a haven for the area of interest-obsessed. No remember what your pursuits are and wherein your passions lie, you’re honestly assured to find a like-minded network equipped to include, train, and make amusing of you.

Founded in 2005, Reddit is one of the oldest social networks featured on our list, a truth that’s evidenced via its uncanny similarity to vintage-college discussion boards. This virtually hasn’t broken the platform’s potential to always attract new customers, though, as Reddit has continuously maintained a yr-on-yr MAU increase of 30%.

Number of Monthly Active Reddit Users Worldwide 2020

Reddit prospers inside the US, where 25% of the united states of america’s adults actively use the platform to examine and share data. Reddit.Com is currently ranked as the usa’s eighth most popular website and boasts a median visit duration of 20.06 minutes – comfortably longer than Amazon, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, and eBay.

50.Eight% of Reddit’s desktop traffic originates from America, with the United Kingdom (7.Eighty five%) and Canada (7.76%) taking up the following spots. Australia (four.34%) misses out on the podium.

Currently, Reddit has just over 2.2 million subreddits. These are in large part impartial groups that exist with minimal moderation and interference from the platform itself. This autonomy has played a large element in Reddit’s achievement. Users are capable of form thriving communities around a few pretty obscure subjects – some thing that breeds fierce loyalty to a platform.

In Conclusion
There you pass. The 15 most famous social networking sites and apps. Hands up in case you in no way notion we’d get to the quit of this large listing.

In all seriousness, knowing as a good deal as viable about a platform earlier than you begin selling your emblem on it’s miles definitely crucial to social media advertising and marketing success.

Different features and functions ensure structures more appropriate for one emblem than another. At the equal time, distinctive legacies and cultures also entice precise target market demographics.

Build solid insight into all of these variables and your next social media campaign is a ways more likely to show the returns your commercial enterprise merits.

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