Before launching your social media marketing strategy for your ecommerce business, you need to first get an overview of the distribution of social media usage.
Given the growing penetration and usage of social media these days, you should start your marketing efforts by focusing on the platforms where you can find most of your target audience. To do that, you need to find out which social media platform has the largest user base.
Most popular social media platforms in 2024 by user count
The latest statistics show that Facebook continues to reign strong as the king of social media, with 3.05 billion active users in 2024. That means that nearly three out of every five of the estimated 5.17 billion social media users across the world are active users of Facebook.
Facebook’s statistics and its social media ranking say it all. Not only is it the social media platform with the most active users, but it also ranks among apps that consumers spend the most amount of time on. Global Android users spend 19 hours and 47 minutes per month on the Facebook app.
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Second on the list of the most popular social media platforms in 2024 is YouTube, with 2.49 billion active users—81.7% of the number of Facebook users.
Given that 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide, it may seem like an uphill task to get your video noticed. But also consider these YouTube statistics: 1 billion hours of video on YouTube are watched daily and one-quarter of people say they discover new products through YouTube ads.
The third- and fourth-most popular social media platforms are WhatsApp and Instagram, with 2 billion active users each. Incidentally, both are owned by the same parent company as Facebook: Meta (previously Facebook).
Further down the list are TikTok and WeChat, China’s version of WhatsApp, with 1.56 billion and 1.34 billion global users, respectively. These six social networks are the only ones boasting over a billion active users worldwide.
WeChat is followed by Facebook Messenger, another Meta-owned entity, with 979 million users worldwide. This social media ranking paints a clear picture of Meta’s dominance. Of the seven most popular social media platforms, more than half are its entities—namely Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger.
The eighth- to 10th-most popular social media platforms are:
- Telegram: 800 million
- Douyin: 752 million
- Snapchat: 750 million
