Social media platforms started off as the best places to post pictures, make friends, get a few followers and have lots of fun. This has changed gradually over the years as these platforms take over the world. Social media platforms and apps have become a key ingredient in the marketing strategy of most businesses around the world. Professional, personal and modern networking methods all revolve around social media.
Today, a strong social media presence is essential for any business that wants to achieve its goals. Enterprises need to be where their customers are. And most of the people around the world are on social media platforms. In this post, we are going to discuss the social media platforms that are taking over the world If you have a business, you must check our list to ensure that you are using the right platform.
15 Best Social Media Platforms & Apps
The method that we used to determine the best social media platforms and apps is the number of users who have registered themselves on the platform. The tech industry uses this method to determine engagement, popularity, and growth levels.
Facebook is one of the leading social media platforms in the world. While we can’t praise it for everything, Facebook is the platform that showed millions of people around the world the potential of the internet. It also changed how human beings communicate with each other. The organization has had a few rough days.
These challenges haven’t prevented it from achieving its goals. Since its launch in 2004, it took less than a year to reach and surpass a million subscribers. And only eight years to hit the billion mark. Facebook had 2.74 billion users in early 2021. This means that six new users were registering every second.
Despite its popularity, the platform isn’t the most visited on the globe. When compared with other platforms, Facebook is the most popular platform among users who are between 12 to 34 years. People in this age bracket reported that Facebook is their favorite social media platform.
YouTube
YouTube is the second most popular platform in the world using the metric that we discussed earlier. At the moment, it has 2.29 billion active users. However, users can enjoy using the site without having to register. Therefore, the platform may have more users than our reported figure.
The platform was launched back in 2005 and it was aimed at helping people meet their better half. It encouraged women to post videos and talk about their preferred partners. Since only a handful of people used the platform, a decision was reached – the site would be open for anyone to upload their videos.
The company dealt with legal and technical issues along the way and eventually became the leading video-sharing platform. The platform was later acquired by Google 16 months after its launch. More than seventy percent of the adults in America use YouTube.
WhatsApp was founded by two former Yahoo employees back in 2009. The goal of WhatsApp back then was not to be a messaging app but to show the status of people next to their names in a user’s phonebook. Later, it evolved to become an instant messaging app that dominated the market and made the founders wealthy thanks to its acquisition by Facebook back in 2014. WhatsApp is one of the few social media platforms with more than two billion active users. Its recent growth has surprised a lot of people.
Since the platform has not yet integrated advertising into its model, you shouldn’t expect a lot from it when it comes to marketing. However, this doesn’t mean that your business won’t get marketing value from the platform. WhatsApp has managed to beat other popular messaging apps such as WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and Telegram to name a few.
Instagram is the world’s most popular app when it comes to sharing photos. At the moment, it has 1.22 billion active users. It was founded back in 2009 by Kevin Systrom. It was a product of diligent analysis of social media platforms at the time. The initial seed funding round allowed the founder to improve the app and attract a broader audience. In 2012, Facebook acquired the platform for $1 billion.
One of the biggest contributions of Instagram to the world was creating influencers which allowed people to monetize their fame. Its biggest competitor is Facebook; however, Instagram has higher engagement rates.
WeChat is a social media platform that offers a wide range of functions to enable users to do anything from conducting video calls to sending messages and processing digital payments. You shouldn’t surprise that WeChat is one of the best platforms in the world. Thanks to the platform’s usefulness, it has managed to entice 98.5 percent of mobile users in China. Also, 23 percent of the mobile users in America between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four use this platform.
Quora
Quora stands out as one of the most popular knowledge sharing and learning sites. Launched in 2009 by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, Quora is now an answer hub where people can look to find answers to questions in a vast area of knowledge, including technology, science, and personal growth, to name a few.
Quora is different to traditional forums or question-and-answer sites in that it uses the community approach, with experts, enthusiasts, and ordinary users providing answers and creating a collaborative atmosphere of learning and discussion.
It is now possible to subscribe to particular topics and be notified about new material, which allows users to keep informed on the topics of interest. Moreover, Quora algorithm favors quality content, and the best answers will be on top.
LinkedIn is the most popular professional social networking site that links people and companies in various fields and locations across the world. It has changed how individuals handle their careers, seek employment and develop business connections since its inception in the year 2003. Individuals are able to make comprehensive profiles of their work experience, skills, education, and accomplishments and companies can list jobs, find talent, and news in the industry.
The advanced search features of LinkedIn make it easier to find related contacts, enter into groups according to professional interests and engage in forums. The site also provides features to monitor the trends in the industry, keep up to date with news and comments of industry luminaries and develop personal branding by publishing articles and sharing professional achievements.
X (Previously Twitter)
Acquired and renamed X in November 2023, the service remains an important source of real-time news, opinion, and cultural commentary. Since its launch back in 2006, Twitter has been heralded as the place that has changed the way people communicate and discuss the events around them, giving the platform an arena of breaking news, political debates, and viral moments that draw the attention of people around the world.
The limited character count and fast-paced style of Twitter enables communication in the present tense and enables the distribution of ideas to reach many people, and thus, it is a valuable tool through which individuals and organizations can express themselves and connect with the audiences. Even though it has been struggling and has received a lot of criticism, Twitter has continued to be relevant in trendsetting, informing opinion, and being a focal point of journalists, influencers, and other ordinary users to keep abreast and connected.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a video and photo-sharing platform that became famous for displaying posts for a short while before they were deleted. This made the interactions on the platforms happen immediately by mostly the younger generation. This also enabled the app to break the mold when it came to lenses and filters – features that boosted Snapchat interactions and infused creativity that lacked in other social media platforms.
Snapchat has recorded some serious growth in and out of Europe and the United States. As of 2020, the users of the platform in other parts of the world have outnumbered European and United States users.
Pinterest is a popular image-sharing platform that experienced rapid growth back in 2020 by gaining more than 100 million active users. If you want to promote your brand on this platform, you should keep in mind that Pinterest has already started making a mark out of the US market. At the moment, the app has been largely dominated by female users.
TikTok
If you’ve been thinking of overnight success stories, you should consider researching extensively on TikTok. The platform was developed back in 2017 and quickly started racking up figures that made its competitors jealous. A few years after it emerged into the social media world, TikTok is among the topmost downloaded apps in the world. This platform outperformed WhatsApp which was the most downloaded app back then by more than 200 million downloads. TikTok has managed to broaden its demographic reach. At the moment, 47 percent of adults in the United States use the platform.
Threads
Threads is a new social media platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta in late 2023, which is designed to reinvent social networking and focus on short-form content (in the spirit of Instagram, but with a more immediate, focused user experience).
The app enables the users to make and share posts, stories, and reels and promotes quick interactions and instant updates. Its most prominent attribute is the capacity to communicate with other users of Threads without having to be connected with them as most established networks such as Facebook and Instagram do.
Threads also focus on privacy and security and provides direct messages with end-to-end encryption, which is another aspect that will appeal to those users that worry about their safety online. In its further development, Threads has the potential to change the way social media is used by people and prioritize speed and ease of use instead of the complicated webs that the older platforms enable.
Discord
Discord has managed to establish itself in the social media market by specializing in the gaming community. First released in 2015, Discord is a communication platform aimed at offering effective and fun environment to gamers to engage each other in multiplayer games, plan events and create groups of people with common interests. It provides text channels, voice channels and video call in specific servers where users can communicate in real time along with different games or gaming-related topics.
In addition to games, Discord has grown into creative projects, professional networking, and general hobbyist communities, and as such it is a flexible tool to coordinate the communication of a group. Having strong functionality and easy-to-use design, Discord continues to be the central tool used by people interested in communication with other members of the gaming world.
Reddit is the last platform on our list that has managed to achieve its objectives despite the opposition and shakeups in its management. The platform is ideal for you especially if you are niche-obsessed. Regardless of your passions or interests, you’ll always find a community that is ready to accept, educate and make you smile.
Telegram
Telegram is one of the platforms that benefited immensely from the recent WhatsApp PR disaster. When WhatsApp announced that they were making changes to their privacy policies, the effects were instantaneous. Users stopped using it and shifted to Telegram – a secure social networking platform that is loved by most cryptocurrency traders. As WhatsApp was falling, Telegram gained 25 million new active users in only three weeks. It was also the most downloaded app for both iPhone and Android during this period.
Conclusion
To sum up, the social media world keeps on changing dynamically, as new social media platforms emerge and other old platforms continue to keep on upgrading their features to be able to meet the needs of their users.
Whether it be the unrivaled popularity of Facebook and Twitter to connect individuals worldwide, the visual storytelling features of Instagram, and TikTok that have changed the way people consume content, every social media platform has established its niche.
The professional networking environment provided by LinkedIn presents the greatest possibilities of career growth, whereas Snapchat and WhatsApp transform the sphere of real-time communication. Going forward, it is evident that these best social media sites will remain part and parcel of the way we interact, exchange information and get in touch with one another.
The landscape will however not stay the same, as there will continue technological advancements, evolving user preferences and overall ambient regulatory scrutiny, all of which will affect the way these platforms are run and relate to their users.
The question that these platforms will face is how to change, innovate and focus on user safety and privacy as they remain relevant and engaging in the digital world which is dynamic.
