It is most important to know popular social media sites around for a marketer looking to venture into social media marketing, or a business owner looking to leverage on social media. This can help you to maximize your brand reach on social media, engage with the right people, and achieve your social media goals.
It’s not only the size of the social media sites that matter but also which social media platform is best for your brand? Is the targeted audience using that social media site? And how much of all this can you use at a time?
We have some compiled information about the 21 top social media sites in 2018. Of which most are familiar and the rest are foreign for you. Reading more about the social media sites that you have never come across may help your brand boost. And also you don’t need to be on every social media site!
Let’s plunge in.
1. Facebook – 2.23 billion MAUs
Facebook had 2.23 billion monthly users as of June 30, up 11 percent from a year earlier. Analysts were expecting 2.25 billion, according to FactSet. User growth – both on a monthly and daily basis. This most popular networks worldwide as of October 2018, ranked by a number of active accounts. Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass 1 billion registered accounts and currently sits at 2.23 billion monthly active users. Sixth-ranked photo-sharing app Instagram had 1 billion monthly active accounts.
The most popular social networks usually display a high number of user accounts or strong user engagement. For example, market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass 1 billion monthly active users.
2. YouTube – 1.9 billion MAUs
Youtube has over 1.9 billion active users who log on to its services every month, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has revealed in a blog post adding that users across the globe watch YouTube videos for more than 180 million hours every day.
Youtube’s overall interactions, such as likes, comments and chats, grew by more than 60 per cent year over year.
YouTube team had made a conscious effort to respond to social media and that they had answered 600 per cent more tweets via various official handles including Team YouTube, YT Creators and YouTube in 2018 than in 2017. This has helped YouTube to expand its reach by 30 per cent in the past couple of months.
Apart from this, YouTube has built a new feature that enables the service to deliver relevant information in YouTube Studio, formerly known as Creator Studio. “The dashboard, which launched for all English channels and will soon be available in an additional 76 languages, now gives you platform updates and news along with performance about your latest videos in one easy-to-find place.
3. WhatsApp – 1.5 billion MAUs
WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion monthly active users (MAUs) who are exchanging nearly 60 billion messages on a single day, Instagram is now the most popular Story-sharing product, followed by WhatsApp. Both Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status features now have 300 million daily active users (DAUs) — compared to 178 million Snapchat users, TechCrunch reported.
To help businesses communicate better with their customers in India, WhatsApp last month officially rolled out “WhatsApp Business” – a free-to-download Android app for small businesses – in the country.
4. Messenger – 1.3 billion MAUs
The Messenger surpassed the one billion monthly active users (MAUs). The growth of Messenger now puts the app at par with Facebook-owned WhatsApp which also has 1.3 billion MAUs.
The growth comes as Messenger and WhatsApp both have taken concrete steps towards monetisation.
“We have rolled out ‘Instant Games’ more broadly and bringing ‘Messenger Lite’ to more countries. We also redesigned the Inbox so that all of your favourite features are front and centre making it easier to connect,” the Messenger post read.
5. WeChat – 1.06 billion MAUs
First released in 2011, WeChat is a mobile messaging app developed by the Chinese company Tencent. In its home market of China, WeChat is marketed as Weixin and was rebranded as WeChat in 2012 for international audiences. As of the fourth quarter of 2016, WeChat had 889 million users, a significant increase from the previous year, when the messaging app had about 697 million users in the corresponding quarter. WeChat is one of the leading social networks worldwide, placing fifth in a number of active users.
WeChat has lots of popular messaging app features, including Moments. About 61 percent of WeChat users access WeChat Moments every time they open the app, and 22.6 percent of WeChat users use the WeChat Moments feature often. Voice and text messaging, group messaging, payment and games are other examples of WeChat activities.
6. Instagram – 1 billion MAUs
Instagram’s meteoric rise continues, dwarfing the stagnant growth rates of Snapchat and Facebook. Today Instagram announced that it has reached 1 billion monthly active users, after passing 800 million in September 2017 with 500 million daily users.
That massive audience could be a powerful draw for IGTV, the longer-form video hub it’s launching for creators today. While IGTV monetization options are expected in the future, content makers may flock to it early just to get exposure and build their fan base.
7. QQ – 861 million MAUs
The QQ messaging platform for PCs was Tencent’s original product for desktop computers and was China’s most popular social networking service for the first decade of the 21st century.
In the first quarter of 2017, WeChat, growing its monthly active user (MAU) numbers at 23 percent a year, became the country’s most popular social platform with 938 million MAUs to overtake QQ, which declined 2 percent to 861 million MAUs in the same period.
Instead of competing with WeChat, QQ has repositioned itself to be a “one-stop entertainment portal” for young Chinese: By transforming QQ from a pure messaging app into one that supports chatting, sharing, interest groups, and digital content like games, anime, literature, music, live streaming, and so on.
QQ’s demographic is young: “60% of all QQ users were born after 1990.”
8. Tumblr – 642 million MUVs
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking site for sharing text, photos, links, videos, audios, and more. A wide range of things on Tumblr from cat photos to art to fashion are been shared
Tumblr blog can look just like any other websites. So many blogs might be using Tumblr that you come across online.
Viral Tag has written a starter guide to Tumblr marketing which can be used to start Tumblr as a marketing site for your brand.
9. Qzone – 632 million MAUs
A largest social network in China with 632 million MAUs.
Qzone seems to be more popular among teenagers (while WeChat is more popular among adults). But the rise of mobile-based platforms like WeChat seemed to have caused a decline in popularity of desktop-based platforms like Qzone.
10. Tik Tok – 500 million MAUs
The popular short video app, the number of its global monthly active users has hit 500 million.
Tik Tok, known as Douyin in mainland China and launched in 2016, is a short video sharing platform where users can watch and produce quick videos using music, stickers and animations as effects. Last month China’s Twitter-like social media, that it had accumulated more than 300 million monthly active users in mainland China alone.
11. Sina Weibo – 392 million MAUs
SinaWeiba – a micro-blogging social network (Twitter alike) with 361 monthly active users as of second quarter of 2017.
140-character microblogging, uploading of photos and videos, commenting, and verification of accounts. What’s on Weibo, a social trends reporting site, wrote a helpful short introduction to Sina Weibo.
12. Twitter – 335 million MAUs
335 million monthly active users – that’s the last update from Twitter in its results for the second quarter of 2017. This number stayed flat compared to the previous quarter.
Twitter, similarly to LinkedIn, doesn’t share amount of daily users.
It’s been a while that we’ve been trying to get a hold of statistics of users on Twitter in Mauritius however it seems unreachable data. According to some research and estimations we did, we assume there are a few dozens of thousands of registered Twitter accounts in Mauritius however it’s unclear how many are active.
13. Reddit – 330 million MAUs
Reddit, the social news platform where you can share, vote and discuss, brings estimated 330 million users around the world together every month. It has different levels of engagement so it’s great to research to see if there are popular subreddits that your brand can be part of. You can also find content ideas and advertise on Reddit.
14. Baidu Tieba – 300 million MAUs
Baidu Tieba – although 1.5 billion registered users, there are an estimated 300 million monthly active users using the Chinese social network platform owned by the giant Chinese search engine Baidu.
15. LinkedIn – 294 million MAUs
In April 2017 LinkedIn announced 294 million professionals on the network. It didn’t announce however how many of them are logged in every day. That’s no coincidence. The last time LinkedIn announced DAUs (daily active users) and MAUs (monthly active users) the picture was bright.
In Mauritius as of October 2017 more than 210,000 professionals are registered to LinkedIn.
16. Viber – 260 million MAUs
Viber is quite possibly the largest chat/messaging app to fly completely under the radar here in the United States.
It isn’t often that you can find an app with 260 million registered users that you hardly hear anything about. Check out some of these crazy Viber stats that I was able to dig up recently. I get the feeling we will be hearing more about Viber in the future.
17. Snapchat – 255 million MAUs
In its 2nd quarterly report announcement, August 2017, Snap announced 173 million active users daily. According to past ratio, that makes 255 million monthly active users.
Instead of focusing on raw numbers during the call, Snap execs played up engagement, with Spiegel noting that every daily active user creates 20 snaps per day.
18. Pinterest – 250 million MAUs
If your target audience is American women among others and haven’t used Pinterest yet, we hope this will be your wake up call. With outstanding conversion rates on the platform, Pinterest announced 250 million users on the platform in September 2017.
On Pinterest, there are very few countries (as of October 2017) you can target – Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and US. So needless to say – we couldn’t find any reliable information about users stats in Mauritius but we assume that it’s one magnitude lower than Twitter estimation.
19. Line – 203 million MAUs
Freeware app for instant communications on electronic devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, and personal computers. Line users exchange texts, images, video and audio, and conduct free VoIP conversations and video conferences. In addition, Line is a platform providing various services including digital wallet as Line Pay, news stream as Line Today, video on demand as Line TV, and digital comic distribution as Line Manga and Line Webtoon.
20. Telegram – 200 million MAUs
Within the last 30 days, Telegram was used by 200,000,000 people. This is an insane number by any standards. If Telegram were a country, it would have been the sixth largest country in the world.
There are several ways brands can make use of Telegram, besides providing one-on-one customer support. For example, brands can create chatbots for the Telegram platform or make use of Telegram’s channel feature to broadcast messages to an unlimited number of subscribers.
21. Medium – 60 million MAUs
The platform is of social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is regularly regarded as a blog host.
The platform software provides editing online, with various options for formatting provided as the user edits over rich text format.
Once an entry is posted, it can be recommended and shared by other people, in a similar manner to Twitter.
