Introduction
Whether you are a seasoned social media marketer, a marketer looking to venture into social media marketing, a business owner looking to leverage social media, or build your online presence, it’s helpful to know about the most popular social media sites out there right now. This will allow you to maximize your brand reach on social media, engage with the right people, and achieve your social media goals.
To make things easier, we researched and compiled information about the top social media sites in 2023. Some will be familiar to you, while others might sound new. We recommend reading through this list to learn more about the social media apps that might be great for you or your brand.
Top Ten Social Media icons
The rankings on our list are based on the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs), as well as the relevance to brands and creators.
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Or click THE BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SERVICE to read about Social Networks History.
1 – Facebook
Facebook is the most popular social networking websites on the Internet. Facebook is a popular destination for users to set up personal space and connect with friends, share pictures, share movies, talk about what you're doing, etc. It has 2.96 billion monthly users.
2 - YouTube
YouTube is the largest video-sharing social media site in the world. It lets users upload videos on the platform, view videos from other users, and interact with them. It has 2.51 billion monthly active users. YouTube users spend an average of 40 minutes watching videos on the platform.
Youtube
3 - WhatsApp
WhatsApp is a messaging and calling app that lets users share text messages, images, voice notes, audio files, documents, spreadsheet file, and videos. It has grown exponentially over the years and had about 2 billion monthly active users. Along with its growing user base, the platform has also introduced many new features to make interactions easier among users.
4 - Instagram
It is a mobile photo and video sharing service and application available for iPhone, Android, and Huawei Harmony OS platforms. Users can also access their feed through the website version on a browser. It has an approximately 2 billion monthly active users.
5 – WeChat
First released in 2011, WeChat is a mobile messaging app developed by the Chinese company Tencent. In its home market of China, WeChat was marketed as Weixin and was rebranded as WeChat in 2012 for international audiences. In 2018, WeChat and Weixin surpassed one billion users, which was a significant increase from the previous year. Today, WeChat is one of the leading social networks worldwide, ranking fifth with approximately 1.31 billion users in terms of monthly active users’ number.
6 – TikTok
TikTok is a video-sharing social media app owned by Beijing-based Tech company ByteDance. The mobile platform allows users to create, edit, and share short-form video clips that are jazzed up with filters and accompanied by the latest music trends. Within only a few months of launching internationally in 2017, TikTok has become one of the fastest-growing apps worldwide and a global viral phenomenon with 1.05 billion monthly active users.
TikTok
7 – Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger, also known as Messenger, is an American messaging app and platform developed by Facebook, Inc. Users can send messages and exchange photos, videos, stickers, audio, and files, as well as react to other users' messages and interact with bots. The service also supports voice and video calling. The standalone apps support using multiple accounts, conversations with optional end-to-end encryption, and playing games. It has a number of 931 million monthly active users as at January 2023.
Facebook Messenger
8 – Douyin
Douyin, (literally mean “shaking sound” in Chinese) is a short video media app owned by China’s young Tech giant Bytedance. The app allows users to create, edit, and share short videos as well as livestreams, often featuring music in the background. Douyin’s international name is TikTok, an app that looks the same as Douyin, while in fact, the two are not one and the same, despite Bytedance’s efforts to brand it as such. In practice, this means that when you are a non-Chinese resident, you will be using the ‘international version,’ meaning you will have access to (international-specific) content that a user registered with a Chinese telephone number will not be able to see. Douyin service has 715 million monthly active users.
Douyin
9 – Telegram
This is an instant messaging platform that is somewhat similar to WhatsApp in that you can use it to send free messages. It has a great feature that allows you to create groups of as many as 200,000 members, which is more than what other messaging platforms offer. It is available for both iOS and Android devices, as well as desktops. It has over 700 million users.
Telegram
10 – SnapChat
It is an American multimedia instant messaging app and service developed by Snap Inc. The app was created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, former students at Stanford University. The principal feature of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before they become inaccessible to their recipients.
Snapchat is known for representing a mobile-first direction for social media, and places significant emphasis on users interacting with virtual stickers and augmented reality objects. In January 2023, Snapchat had 635 million monthly active users.
SnapChat
The app has evolved from originally focusing on person-to-person photo sharing to presently featuring users' "Stories" of 24 hours of chronological content, along with "Discover", letting brands show ad-supported short-form content.
Remember, you don't need to be everywhere all at once. So regardless of the size of the social media site, consider whether your brand’s target audience is active on those platforms. It’s advisedly to pick two to three sites and do them well rather than create so many content for five or more different platforms.
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REFERENCE:
- Statista: Most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2023, ranked by number of active users (https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/). Accessed on 27/09/2023.