The Top Ten Most Popular Social Networks in the World

While social media’s audience is widespread and diverse (over 4.5 billion people spread across the globe), just a handful of companies control the majority of the world’s most popular social media platforms. A recent data set compiled by Visual Capitalist captures the most widespread social networks in the world, as well as their owners and geographic locations.

The list goes as follows:

#1. Facebook: with a user base of 2.9 billion, this Meta-owned social media giant ranks fist on this list. The platform’s biggest user base comes from India, with an audience size of almost 350 million. Its second-largest user base is the United States, with 193.9 million users, while Indonesia comes in third with 142.5 million.

#2. YouTube: owned by US-based Alphabet, YouTube hosts 2.3 billion monthly active users (MAU). Founded in 2005, this video streaming platform currently has over 50 million content creators, who share approximately 500 hours of video content every minute.

#3, 4, & 5. WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram: all under the parent company Meta, these platforms each boast 2 billion, 1.3 billion, and 1.2 billion MAUs, respectively. 

#6. WeChat: the most popular of the three networks owned by its parent company Tencent, China-based WeChat has 1.2billion MAUs to its name.     

#7. Kuaishou: owned by a company of the same name, Kuaishou is based in China and has1 billion users on a monthly basis.   

#8. TikTok: acting as the international counterpart of Douyin, TikTok is a platform owned by Bytedance with a monthly user base of 1 billion people.

#9. Telegram: launched in 2013 by the brothers Nikolai, Telegram is registered as a company in the British Virgin Islands and has MAUs of 600 million people.

#10. Qzone: the second most popular platform by Tencent, this network also has a user base of 600 million, most commonly spread throughout Asia.

Source: Visual Capitalist