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 2023 by user count
The latest statistics show that Facebook continues to reign strong as the king of social media, with 3.03 billion active users in 2023. That means that nearly two out of every three of the 4.89 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 18 hours and 50 minutes per month on the Facebook app.
Second on the list of the most popular social media platforms in 2023 is YouTube with 2.49 billion active users—82.2% 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 brands and 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 WeChat, China’s version of WhatsApp, and TikTok, with 1.33 billion and 1.22 billion global users, respectively. This is followed by Facebook Messenger, another Meta-owned entity, with 1.04 billion users worldwide.
These statistics paint a clear picture of Meta’s dominant social media ranking. 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
- Snapchat: 750 million
- Douyin: 743 million
https://www.shopify.com/uk/blog/most-popular-social-media-platforms