Top 10 Most Popular Social Media Platforms in 2024

Before launching a social media marketing strategy for your e-commerce business, it is crucial to understand the global distribution of social media usage. Given the growing popularity of social media around the world, choosing the platforms that best suit your target audience is the first step towards successful marketing. Here are the most popular social media platforms in 2023, broken down by number of active users:

Facebook (Active Users: 3.03 billion): The latest statistics show that Facebook remains the king of social media, with nearly two-thirds of the world's 4.89 billion social media users active. Consumers spend a whopping 18 hours and 50 minutes per month on the Facebook app.

YouTube (active users: 2.49 billion): YouTube ranks second, boasting 82.2 percent of the number of active users that Facebook has. 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day, but a whopping 1 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube every day, and a quarter of users discover new brands and products through YouTube ads.

WhatsApp and Instagram (2 billion active users each): WhatsApp and Instagram, ranked third and fourth respectively, are both owned by Meta (formerly Facebook). Together with Facebook, these two dominate Meta's social media ranking.

WeChat (active users: 1.33 billion) and TikTok (active users: 1.22 billion): WeChat is China's version of WhatsApp, with 1.33 billion users globally, followed by TikTok with 1.22 billion users worldwide.

Facebook Messenger (active users: 1.04 billion): Owned by Meta, Facebook Messenger has 1.04 billion users globally and is also a key platform in the social media ranking.

In addition, the 8th to 10th position in the social media ranking are:

· Telegraph (active users: 800 million)

· Snapchat (active users: 750 million)

· Jitterbug (active users: 743 million)

These statistics clearly demonstrate the dominance of Meta's social media platforms, whose entities include Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, accounting for more than half of the seven most popular social media platforms. When developing a social media marketing strategy, choosing the right platforms based on your target audience will have a key impact on achieving success.