Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites and Apps

Maybe you know the top 3 or even the top 5 social networking sites, but do you know what’s happening behind them?

We have compiled a list of top 15 most popular social networking worldwide. The findings are based on latest original research which. New social media sites are coming and going but these have stood the test of time. We update this list of social media sites with new data as it becomes available. The data in this list combines global and US social media visitors. The actual numbers of monthly visitors are gathered from different sites. We bring you the latest data out there.

• Instagram announces 800 million users in their blog post.
• Twitter has updated its active user numbers over a long time to 330 million
• Pinterest monthly active users have increased by another 25 million to 200 million
• VK reached 97 million monthly active users
• Reddit adds 16 million users and displays 250 million users on website.

Top Social Networking Sites

Facebook jumped by 60 million monthly active users from 1.94 billion in march 2017 to 2.01 billion as of June 30, 2017 (Later updated to 2.07B). The rate of growth seems to continue at 20 million active users per month. So, by the end of the year we should see 2.3 billion Facebook monthly active users. Here’s the post where Zuckerberg announced the news:

Here’s the graph of top 15 social networking sites in the world. As you can see Facebook is leading the pack with a huge margin in front of Youtube. Then there’s another gap of similar size to Instagram on the third place.

Visual size comparison

Again, on this graph you can see the three large circles dominating the rest. Only Twitter and Reddit battling it out for the fourth space seem to come close to the top 3. However, in Russia VK has a huge penetration, dominating the Russian speaking world as Facebook does globally.

Top Social Networking Apps

With the growing popularity of mobile social networking, we have also created a list of 10 leading social apps globally. These apps are in fierce competition with the main social sites already!

The picture here is a bit different if we look at the brand names. WhatsApp and Messenger are in a close race for the top spot. But both of theses most popular social media apps are owned by Facebook so the competition may not be as fierce as between completely separate companies. Then there’s a lot of Asian apps and then on the sixth spot is Instagram, again owned by Facebook.

• WhatsApp added another 100 million monthly active users reaching 1.3 billion. Facebook Messenger promptly added another 100 million users and now they are tied again with 1.3 billion monthly active users. Both of these mobile platforms are owned by Facebook.
• WeChat took the 3rd position as it passed QQ with more than 70 million monthly active users as QQ continues to slide.

Social networking apps are going to grow even bigger as people adopt them into their everyday lives. Here we have listed the mobile-first social media platforms. But the Facebook mobile app would dominate this list with 1.37 billion monthly active users. As smartphones’ adoption continues, the share of the desktop use of social media platforms will fall .

For list of social media apps that are smaller check List of virtual communities with more than 100 million active users from Wikipedia.