Top 10 Biggest Social Media Sites and Apps [2022]

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

 Every year, the whims of a fickle public, the introduction of new players, and shifting global trends trigger a shuffle in social media’s most important leaderboard.

 Aside from these shifts just being “generally quite interesting” to industry watchers, they’re also super useful for savvy digital marketers.

 Knowing how deeply each of these platforms reaches into the global online community is critical to your company’s social media marketing strategy. As understanding other nuances relating to the platform’s growth.

 Choosing which social network your brand is going to focus its marketing efforts on is a very important decision and one that shouldn’t be taken purely on a hunch.

 Sure, a particular social media platform may “feel right” for your brand, but we recommend that you take a bunch of other variables into consideration before leaping. Amongst these, “relative popularity” and “growth” are two of the most important factors.

 So, to help your brand with this crucial decision, Dreamgrow maintains this post: An up-to-date view on the movers, shakers, newcomers, and immovable monoliths that make up the social media landscape.

 Let’s jump in.

 The Top 1o Social Media Sites and Apps by Active Users

  The metric we use to determine a social network’s size is the “number of active users” – the total amount of unique users currently registered on the platform. It’s a metric that’s used throughout the tech industry as a key indicator of popularity, engagement, and growth.

 Below is a graph depicting the top 10 social networking sites and apps as calculated by the industry-leading provider of business data, Statista.

 A Closer Look at the Top 10 Social Networks

1. Facebook – 2.74 Billion Active Users,

 Facebook is the undisputed heavyweight champion of social media platforms.

 While it can’t take credit for getting everything started, that honor goes to Six Degrees (RIP), Facebook is the social media juggernaut that not only showed the world what the internet can be but also fundamentally changed the way humans interact with each other.

 The company’s turbulent early days and continued association with epic controversies haven’t stopped it from achieving mind-boggling growth since its 2004 launch.

 It took Facebook only ten months to reach a million subscribers and only eight years to reach a billion. As of January 2022, Facebook boasts 2.74 billion active users – a number that grows with roughly 500,000 new users every day, or six new users every second.

 Despite its immense popularity, Facebook isn’t the most visited website in the world. Somewhat surprisingly, its 25.5 billion monthly visits are bested by YouTube’s 34.6 billion and eclipsed by Google’s 92.5 billion.

 In comparison to other social media platforms, Facebook is the most popular amongst users aged between 12 and 34 years, although their US-based share of this demographic is most definitely shrinking.

 The Infinite Dial reports that the 58% of survey respondents in this age group who identified Facebook as their favorite social network in 2015 has shrunk to 32% in 2020. The biggest culprit – is Instagram. The photo and video-sharing social network saw its share of this demographic go from 15% to 27% in the same period.

 Here are some other interesting facts about Facebook usage:

• India is the country with the most active Facebook users (290 million), the US is 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 disinformation, 36% of US citizens say they regularly use the platform as a source of news.
•  The average American user spends up to 38 minutes per day on Facebook.

 2. YouTube – 2.291 Billion Active Users

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

 However, since ANYONE can enjoy YouTube content, regardless of whether or not they’re a registered user, this figure may not be the most accurate representation of the platform’s true 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 entice women into posting videos of themselves talking about their ideal partners.

 The (rather understandable) lack of response resulted in the site being opened up for videos of any kind – a decision that would ultimately make Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim multi-millionaires.

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

 YouTube is also one of a tiny selection of social media platforms that reaches very young age groups. A 2020 study conducted by Pew Research revealed the following about the viewing habits of US children under the age of 11.

•  80% of parents say their children watch YouTube videos.
•  Only 19% of parents say that their children don’t watch YouTube videos.
•  More than half of parents said their children watched YouTube at least once a day.

 Despite its popularity amongst a younger audience, YouTube also boasts some remarkable stats for reaching the adult demographic. Almost three-quarters (74%) of all adults in the US use YouTube. Facebook comes in second with 68% and Instagram is third with 40%.

 When it comes to national demographics, more than 30% of all YouTube’s traffic originates from only three countries. At 16.4%, the United States contributes the biggest percentage. India is second with 9.2% and Japan grabs the bronze with 4.8%.

3. WhatsApp – 2.0 Billion Active Users

 Founded in 2009 by two former Yahoo! employees, WhatsApp’s original goal wasn’t to be an instant messaging (IM) app, but rather to simply show “statuses” next to the names of each entry in a user’s address book.

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

 This accidental evolution led to the app dominating the free IM market and would also end up making the founders immensely wealthy – the latter 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 in 2020. The app’s recent growth rate has been astonishing, with the last billion users hopping on in only four years!

 Because WhatsApp has resisted integrating traditional advertising into its revenue model, the platform doesn’t offer the width of marketing options that many other social networks do. But that doesn’t mean that the app doesn’t offer enormous marketing value for businesses who use it as a communications tool.

 Despite a recent PR catastrophe surrounding an ill-advised update to their privacy policy, WhatsApp is still the most popular mobile messaging app on earth, beating Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ, Telegram, and Snapchat to the title.

4. Facebook Messenger – 1.3 Billion Active Users

 It says a lot about the power of Facebook that a service WITHIN its main platform reached the number four spot on this prestigious list.

 It also says a lot about WhatsApp that they were able to dramatically outperform Messenger despite the latter being embedded into the world’s most popular social network.

 Messenger’s initial incarnation was “Facebook Chat” – a simple IM feature that was launched into the Facebook environment in 2008. Noting 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’s proprietors had no issue with introducing monetization features into the app’s core functionality. As a result, Messenger offers businesses an unparalleled level of contact with their customers and prospects.

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

 Facebook gleefully reports that over 40 million active businesses use Messenger to interact with their potential customers and that over 20 billion messages are sent between businesses and regular users every month.

 Interestingly, while Messenger still lags behind WhatsApp in terms of the total number of global active users, Messenger is comfortably the more popular choice amongst users in the United States.

 Statista’s most recent figures on US IM engagement reported that 12.1% of US mobile owners were using WhatsApp, compared to Messenger’s 56.8%.

 Age-wise, there’s one group that towers above the rest when it comes to Facebook Messenger adoption in the United States:

• 13 – '17-year olds' account for 1.7% of the app’s usage.
• 18 – '24-year olds' account for 14.7% representing 27.3% of Messenger’s US user base.
• 35 – '44-year olds' come in second with 21%.
• 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 by former Google employee, Kevin Sistrum, in 2009, Instagram is the product of an incredibly diligent analysis of the social media landscape at the time.

 An early round of seed funding allowed Sistrum to pivot the app, which initially focused on attracting whiskey and bourbon aficionados, into something broader. Something with industry-defining image manipulation tech and a far more immersive social experience than any other image-sharing service at 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 stood at 80 million users. By June 2016, it reached the landmark 500 million figure.

 One of Instagram’s most enduring contributions to the world of digital marketing was the creation of “influencers”. For better or worse, certain users’ popularity gave their profiles an “aspirational” slant, which soon resulted in the birth of a whole new marketing channel that empowered regular folk to monetize their fame.

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

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

 At 140 million users each, the US and India represent the platform’s two biggest national demographics. Brazil (99 million) is ranked second and Indonesia (88 million) third, while Russia (56 million) misses out on a podium finish.

6. Weixin/WeChat – 1.213 Billion Active Users

 With an incredibly wide range of functions that allow users to do everything from sending text messages and conducting video calls to processing digital payments and playing video games, it’s no surprise that WeChat has such a high position on our list.

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

 Regardless of this unfortunate collaboration, WeChat has blasted its way into virtually every aspect of Chinese life – a notion underscored by the fact that the app’s adoption by older age groups is extremely impressive.

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

 For social media marketers in the US considering WeChat as a possible marketing channel, it’s useful to know that 23% of America’s mobile internet users between the ages of 18 and 24 are registered on the app.

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 started racking up adoption figures that made competitors weep onto their keyboards.

 Two years after its emergence onto the social media landscape, TikTok was in the top five of the world’s most downloaded apps. A year later, it was number one. And not by a small margin, either.  The fledgling social network outperformed its nearest rival, WhatsApp, by a staggering 250 million downloads.

 Have a look at the table below for some more context. The difference between WhatsApp and third-placed Facebook is only 60 million downloads!

 TikTok still has a ways to go to catch 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 property owned by the Chinese conglomerate Tencent (the other is WeChat), QQ has been around forever (in internet years). 

 Launched under the name OICQ in 1999 as a downloadable instant messaging service, the platform quickly became China’s most popular digital contact platform and played a pivotal role in “killing” email in the world’s most populous country.

 QQ’s early rise to dominance as a business communication platform was helped by the software’s exceptional handling of file transfers. This created a network effect where companies simply HAD to be on QQ because all their partners, vendors, and clients were already using it.

 Being first to market with such a useful platform, especially in a territory that actively blocks so many external cloud-based apps, helped build the foundation for QQ’s enormous success.

 Despite its ubiquity in China, QQ hasn’t managed to make its mark on the rest of the world.   International versions of the platform weren’t integrated with many valuable QQ products, rendering it mostly valueless outside its home territory.

9. Doyen – 600 Million Active Users

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

 Doyen has become one of the most popular marketing channels for luxury brands in China. Many have struggled to create meaningful engagement with the platform’s young user base, but there have been some success stories.

 Unlike TikTok, Doyen has embraced user-monetization and provided content creators with more concrete mechanisms to generate a revenue stream from their videos – mainly by integrating with popular Chinese e-commerce platforms like Taobao.

10. Sina Weibo – 511 Million Active Users

 Sina Weibo is a Chinese property that started as a microblogging site and has evolved into the country’s third-largest social network.

 Unlike the other Chinese platforms on this list, Weibo’s focus is very much on creating, delivering, and consuming user-generated content. It’s an information center that’s been adopted by businesses, journalists, influencers, and regular folk alike.

 Companies, especially, have taken to Weibo as a marketing platform, with several international brands even succeeding in tapping into the massive Chinese market. The most successful of these has been Tourism Australia, which is Weibo’s “most promising and popular outbound destination award” at a Chinese influencer summit in 2019.

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