What are the top 10 Social Media Platforms? To make this easy for you, we profiled the top 10 social media sites so you can make informed marketing decisions.
Top Social Media Platforms?
By far, Facebook is the largest social media platform on the web, both in terms of users and brand recognition. Considering it was founded only 15 years ago, by the third quarter of 2018 it has managed to accumulate 2.27 billion monthly active users. Active users are those which have logged into Facebook during the last 30 days. This means it is one of the best mediums to connect with people around the world. This is obviously a huge benefit for businesses of any size and the reason why today, over 5 million businesses use Facebook ads to reach their target audiences.
Businesses use the Twitter platform to interact with customers, provide customer service, release the latest news, and find new potential clients. The platform makes easy since its goal is to connect people with the same interests. Even though 140 characters may not sound like a lot to advertise on the platform, it actually is. With more than 336 million monthly active users worldwide as of the first quarter of 2018, Twitter is one of the biggest social networks worldwide.
LinkedIn is by far the most popular social media site for professional networking. Of the 250 million monthly active users, only 3 million share content on a weekly basis…a little over 1% of monthly users. This creates a huge opportunity for business owners to share valuable content in order to attract potential customers. LinkedIn is also ideal for building connections with people in similar industries, networking with local professionals, and locate potential partners
YouTube
YouTube is a video sharing service where users can watch, like, share, comment and upload their own videos. The video service can be accessed on PCs, laptops, tablets and via mobile phones. It is the second largest search engine after Google and by far the largest video-based social media platform. Their user engagement in mind-boggling. People are now watching 150 million hours of YouTube every day. 1 billion hours of YouTube content are watched per day. YouTube attracts about 1/3 of users on the internet making it a must for any business of any size.
Instagram – owned by Facebook – is a free photo and video sharing app available on Apple iOS, Android and Windows Phone. People can upload photos or videos and share them with their followers or with a select group of friends. They can also view, comment and like posts shared by their friends on Instagram. As of June 2018, the mainly mobile photo sharing network had reached 1 billion monthly active users. Businesses can use the platform to post information about their products or services such as travel, fashion, food, art or any other visual information related to their company.
Rapidly Growing Social Media Platforms
Pinterest is a free website that requires registration to use. Users can upload, save, sort, and manage images—known as pins—and other media content (e.g., videos) through collections known as pinboards. These pinboards can be used by businesses to pin their content. As of September 2018, Pinterest had reached 250 million monthly active users, mostly made up of women.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a mobile messaging application used to share photos, videos, text, and drawings. It’s free to download the app and free to send messages using it. It has become hugely popular in a very short space of time, especially with young people. As of the third quarter of 2018, the photo and video sharing app had 186 million daily active users worldwide. As of January 2018, 78% of internet users aged from 18 to 24 years used the social media platform.
WhatsApp Messenger – owned by Facebook – is a cross-platform instant messaging client for smartphones, PCs, and tablets. WhatsApp Business is an Android app which is free to download and was built with the small business owner in mind. With the app, businesses can interact with customers easily by using tools to automate, sort, and quickly respond to messages. For medium and large businesses, the WhatsApp Business API powers your communication with customers all over the world so you can connect with them on WhatsApp in a simple, secure, and reliable way. Today, more than 1 billion people use the service every day to communicate with their friends, loved ones and even customers.
Periscope
Periscope is Twitter’s new live-streaming video app. It lets you share and experience live video streams direct from your smartphone or tablet so you can watch or broadcast live videos from across the globe. It can be used to capture the atmosphere among fans at an important match, to broadcast an unfolding news story or to experience an event. More than 10 million people have created Periscope accounts and nearly two million people use the app every day.
Deprecated Social Media Platforms
Google+
Google+ is, first and foremost, a platform focused on bringing all of Google together. The main benefit is its SEO value which made it a must have for all businesses regardless of size. Unfortunately, following the revelation of a previously undisclosed security flaw in early 2018 that exposed users’ profile data Google decided to shut down the consumer version of Google+ over the next 10 months.
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