
Top 10 Most Popular Social Media Apps
In 2020 if we spend our majority of the time, then it is social media. Social media make us connected with the world.
Now if you have questions about the most popular social media apps, then you are reading the right article. In this article, we are going to talk about the most popular social media apps.
So without any wasting your time, I am going to breakdown the list of most popular social media platforms. So let’s get started.
1. Facebook – 2.78 billion MAUs
In the list of most popular social media, Facebook comes at the top. Facebook has changed the world. This has connected people from long distances.
Because of this people can be connected with someone from all over the world. Today we’re talking about the biggest social media network on the planet.
So Facebook is a social networking site that was launched on February 4th, 2004. The founder of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. He created this with his four friends and roommates.
Originally, Facebook was created to connect students at Harvard University, but it quickly expanded to other schools. In 2006 when it was then open to anybody 13 years of age or older.
Today, Facebook is one of the best methods that people use to get in touch with over 150,000 messages sent via the site.
The Facebook mobile app is one of the best social media apps and it is used by users every single minute. On top of that, every 15 minutes, there are 51 million posts on Facebook, 160,000new friend requests, and 7.8 million new likes.
Facebook’s colors were made blue because Mark Zuckerberg is a red, green colorblind. Actually, Facebook sees over 2.78 billion users every single month with 79% of them accessing the site through their phones.
Since the number of active users is increasing dramatically every day, it’s impossible to declare an accurate number of how many profiles and pages that there actually are.
But, according to employees at Facebook, there are only 3.85 degrees of separation on average between any two users. Now with the network adding eight people every single second, that number is ever-shrinking.
Shockingly, more Facebook users in the United States thanUS citizens actually voted in the most recent election.
One of the major exceptions, of course, is China where the site, as well as other major social networking sites like Twitter and even YouTube, have been blocked by the government since July 2009.
The Chinese government believes that Facebook is a threat to the Chinese government’s national security. Despite this, there are over 95 million users in China, many of which whom simply use VPNs to get around the block, and 79% of them are using their cell phones to access the website. things.
That’s exactly I have to mention this on the ‘most popular social media’ list. Facebook has connected people all over the world and for most of the people, the benefits far outweigh the negative issues that it brings into our lives.
2. YouTube – 2.15 billion MAUs
Now we are going to talk about YouTube, which is of the top social media sites. Youtube is a phenomenon that we have all come to love.
For many of us, it’s not only a site that we use to learn things, like how to fix the sink, but it’s also the site where we consume most of our entertainment.
But even though many of us have made this website part of our everyday lives, very few of us know about its origins or just how big it really is today. There are more than 2.15 billion users that visit YouTube every month.
On this website, there are billions of hours of video get watched daily, making YouTube the Internet’s largest video hosting website. So I should mention it in the list of most popular social media apps.
There are more than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. To put that into context, the amount of video uploaded to this website every month is more than the three major U.S.
Television networks have been created in the last 60 years. When YouTube was created and is hosted in the U.S., there are more than 80% of traffic that comes to the website is from outside of the U.S.
That means, that all of those views allow people like me to make a living off of what they love, which is making videos. YouTube was launched in February of 2005. It was created by three early PayPal employees: Steven Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.
Hurley joined the other founders after he found a job article about the startup in Wired magazine. He emailed them for the job, after which he was posted on to design the logo for the company, which is still used today.
Interestingly, the money for YouTube came from when eBay bought PayPal and provided bonuses to the three guys.
When it started to become popular, the choice of the name YouTube.com became a huge problem for a similarly named website UTube.com.
The owner of the site, UniversalTube & Rollform Equipment has filed a lawsuit against YouTube in 2006, after being regularly overloaded by people looking for the site.
Universal Tube has since changed the name of their website to UTubeOnline.com. The three founders decided not to go with the dating site idea but decided to keep the video portion of it.
Then, two important events occurred that forever shaped what we would come to know as YouTube. The first event was when Karim was unable to find the infamous Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction video online.
The second reason for the YouTube idea was when Hurley and Chen were unable to share a video from a dinner party with their friends due to the email attachment limitations.
YouTube offices are known for being cool places full of free food, drinks, and awesome facilities for employees, but the original YouTubeoffice, created in 2005, was anything but glamorous.
Chad Hurley’s garage was the first-ever YouTube office. They started off slow, but eventually in 2006 were able to move into an office space above a pizzeria near San Mateo, California.
It was there that they hired the first 20 YouTube employees all eager to be a part of something exciting and new. Surprisingly, and embarrassingly, in an attempt to popularize the site, the company offered$100 to attractive girls who posted 10 videos or more on the site.
Yeah, that’s kinda creepy. The advertisement was even placed on Craigslist but was completely ignored, leaving YouTube with no responses.
Before 300 hours of video was being uploaded to the site every minute, it all started with just one, a 19-second clip called “Me at the Zoo.” Shot by Yakov Lapitsky, a friend of Jawed Karim, it shows Jawed at the San Diego Zoo in front of an elephant enclosure talking about how long their trunks are.
Since its upload on April 23, 2005, it has gained a whopping almost 118 million views. It’s the only video on Jawed’s channel, yet that channel has gained over 1.2 million subscribers.
Just one year after being launched, YouTube became a very popular video sharing site. This got the attention of Google who saw the potential that online video had, and in October of 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion in stock from the three founders only 18 months after the site’s creation.
This worked out quite well because the founders were just as interested in selling the websites Google was interested in buying it.
The first-ever YouTube video to hit 1 million views was Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho’s Nike called “Touch of Gold” after it went viral in 2005.
In 2006, NBC became the first traditional media company to strike a deal with YouTube to put their content on the site.
In 2007, YouTube launched the Partnership Program, which allowed people to get paid for the content that they upload to the site, which of course, changed everything.
In 2009, YouTube teamed up with Vivendi to launch a new music video service. That is called Vevo. In November of 2009, a high-definition video was finally enabled on the site.
In 2010, YouTube began offering movies for rent on the site. In 2011, YouTube Live was created to enable the website to stream everything from concerts to news coverage.
And of course, as of today, there are thousands of YouTube partners making a living off of the site. It’s a good living, as long as you can get past the troll comments.
3. WeChat – 1.28 billion MAUs
When we talk about communication, WeChat always places at the top social media apps. WeChat is a ‘Made in China’ app used across China, and in other Asian nations. What started as an app mainly for mobile messaging, WeChat is now the only app used by hundreds of millions of Chinese people.
You can pay bills anywhere using WeChat Pay, which is directly linked to your bank account. Thousands of services are linking to WeChat—meaning you can pay your bills, order a cab, book a doctor’s appointment, or even apply fora driver’s license all through WeChat and all on your phone.
We spent a day at a location where WeChat is based using the app to pay for everything from DimSum to gasoline to oranges. China is fast becoming a cashless society thanks to WeChat and its Chinese competition.
WeChat’s Red packet began as a fun way to send money during the lunar new year. That technology has spawned an entire culture of sending rewards to friends, colleagues, and loved ones. 46 billion red packets were sent as China celebrated the year of the rooster.
The company focuses on what works for users, and essentially gets out of the way—allowing 3rd party companies to plug-in their services, simply, and at low cost. That’s why it is in the list of most popular social media.
WeChat also takes social responsibility seriously, pulling down posts from bullies, rooting out rumors and fake news.
It even encourages users not to spend too much time on WeChat. It’s part of life, says the company, but it shouldn’t take over your life. WeChat is now being noticed across the world and is the envy of Silicon Valley.
4. Instagram – 1.15 billion MAUs
Next, in the list of most popular social media in the 4th position, Instagram has grabbed it. Instagram is mainly created for making photos simple and making it beautiful.
Instagram has changed the look of photography and photo sharing. Instagram was created on 6th October 2010 by Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger.
Kevin Systrom worked at Google for three years. His career started as an associate product manager at Google. He had worked with some most popular and valuable product, which we use today.
Kevin worked for Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, Spreadsheet, and many more products. After two years Kevin had got the opportunity to join the google corporate development team.
He always likes to go into social space and he always wants to create something of his own. But due to some reason he was never able to complete his dream.
In 2009 Kevin Systrome join nextstop.com, as a product manager. While he was working at the next stop he had decided to be an entrepreneur.
Now, Kevin Systrom is the Founder and CEO of Instagram. The name Instagram refers to form ‘Instant Telegram’ and they decided to give a short name to the app.
People love this app for the filters and detailed editing of the unique app. Because until 2010, there was no option to edit on any social media.
But Instagram was the first to introduce us to editing filters on any social media. people love this Social media because you just have to follow and share your favorite photos.
In nine-month, until the app launched it has able to gather 7 million users including Justin Bieber, who is an international singer.
Soon Instagram becomes a celebrity hub, where the world’s most popular celebrities share their photos.
People like this site because of the filters which makes the photos amazing. celebrities share their day to day life photos with amazing filters.
Because of the amazing filters, Instagram manages to attract all the celebrities of the world. Now Instagram is one of the top social media sites.
The sudden growing popularity makes mark Zuckerberg a bit tense and made him attract to Instagram.
Because of Instagram, the number of photo uploading on Facebook becomes decrease. So Mark Zuckerberg decided to buy Instagram.
But Kevin Systrom wants to make Instagram an independent most popular social media platform. But Mark Zuckerberg convinced Kevin and offered him $1 billion for Instagram.
Many investors suggest Mark Zuckerberg not to invest in this new social media platform. But now we know that Instagram has 1.15 billion monthly active users and the worth of Instagram in 2020 is more than $100 billion.
Now the Instagram app has become one of the best social media apps in the social media industry.
5. Weibo – 540 million MAUs
The Chinese company is also leading the list of most popular social media. They are creating their own social media rather than using Americans’ social media platforms.
This is another Chinese largest social media network, which has one 540 million active users every month. Actually, it is used for microblogging.
It was launched in 2009. those when do outsourcing and also do coding and microblogging, Weibo will be beneficial for them.
6. TikTok – 850 million MAUs
Now we are going to talk about an app, which is very popular and favorite for all. This app not only a favorite for people but it also ranks number 1 in the play store & app store.
In a short time, this app has been managing to gather a huge user audience. This app not only entertains you but it also helps you to make money by creating video and live to broadcast.
So we have added this to the list of most popular social media apps. We are talking about TikTok and this is a Chinese video social network and live broadcasting app.
In this app, you can create short videos from 15 seconds to 60 seconds. You can also add a soundtrack to your videos. Also, there are lots of features in this app. In TikTok, you can have timelapse, fast, normal, slow motion, and epic.
With these features, you can make your videos amazing beautiful, and interesting. This will help you to make your video unique & interesting.
With this app, you can also add filters and effects to your video, which makes your video amazing, and it looks viewable. Because of these features, it becomes one of the best social media apps in the social media industry.
Previously Tiktok was Musical.ly, which was created by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang which was released in April 2014. The response musically was quite good. But it wasn’t catching any trend.
So for shooting the trend they have added a new feature which is the lip-sync feature. With this feature, you can play music in the background and lip-sync on that music.
In November 2017, ByteDance has to buy musically for $1 Billion. ByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company, which has launched several products.
In 2016 Bytedance launched Douyin, which was like musically. After buying musically ByteDance has to merge musically with Douyin and created TikTok.
Now TikTok has over 850 million monthly active users, which make TikTok world one of the most popular social media platform.
Tiktok has managed to attract lots of users through their creative features etc. They saw the future in feature, which makes their app amazing.
Tiktok always ranks on top of iTunes. in many app stores, TikTok ranks one number one.
Today TikTok becomes very successful for its in-app purchase. A lot of brands have come into the app and advertising their products.
Many young talents have been found on TikTok. So we just need to put it into the list of top social media apps.
7. Tumblr – 400 million MAUs
Now we are going to talk about Tumblr, which is at the 7th position of the most popular social media.
Tumblr was the brainchild of David Karp and Marco Arment. They wanted to create something called a tumble blog, and since it hadn’t been done yet, they did it and well, it worked.
I still don’t know what a tumble blog is tho. Tumblr was an instant success. More than 75 thousand users in two weeks, leading to a tightknit community.
By 2012 the site started using paid advertising and in 2013 it was bought by yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars. Which was a bad idea cause they lost like 400 million on it but whatever, Yahoo is a dinosaur.
Yahoo was then bought by Verizon in 2017, landing Tumblr in the hands of one of the biggest offenders of net neutrality. By the end of this year, Karp left his own company to the dogs. If you ask me about Tumblr I will say, I do not like it that much.
I always feel like. attending a huge party I wasn’t invited to. I don’t consider myself a Tumblr fan or expert by any means but for the sake of the recent controversy over Tumblr banning all adult content that you may have heard I decided to do a deep dive.
There’s a lot of hate that circles around Tumblr and honestly there’s a good reason for it. However, there is a lot of benefits to using Tumblr.
It’s a place where people that are disenfranchised can reach out, find others, and be together in a space of their choosing to communicate their thoughts and feelings safely. The best thing about Tumblr is, it was free.
Because this app was so was open and individualized Tumblrbrought a wellspring of art and ideas, language, and well, memes. There is TALENT on Tumblr, all over the place, individuals who make what we do look like peeing in a sandbox.
Many people like ponies, some people of them like feet, some people would like a squid, and Ayane from dead or alive trying to procreate.
Some people like all of that together except all the participants are made out of bubbles like that weird dream sequence from dumbo. I know that seems to be specific, but I found it on Tumblr.
8. Reddit – 430 million MAUs
In 2005, two American university students named Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman want to create mobile food order app.
This service will allow people to order foods on your phone and thus bypass the need for queues. But It was 2005, before the iPhone and the subsequent smartphone revolution.
So convincing the public to use their machines for something more practical would be next to impossible.
The idea was very futuristic. In 2005, Reddit along with its fantastic misuse of whitespace made its debut.
The first post of Reddit was submitted by Ohanian himself, and the title was The Downing Street Memo and it still remains online to this day.
The following months which passed, both Ohanian and Huffman created numerous fake accounts to populate the desolate website with interesting links to give any unsuspecting visitors the illusion of a thriving online community.
The design removed or stifled many popular features, disproportionately favor advertisers, and alienated its core userbase.
Now a few days after implementation, users protested the redesign by flooding the front page with links to the site’s competitor.
Thousands of Diggers now became Redditors overnight and they never looked back. Daily visitors fell by 26% in less than last month and searches for Reddit quickly surpassed that of Digg.
Naturally, Reddit capitalized on their rival’s miss-step by welcoming the newcomers and even they changed the logo to resemble that of Digg’s.
To better illustrate this downfall I took the liberty to collect the highest-ranked post on the front page of Digg for each day between May and December of 2010.
Now you can see, the decline is quite evident and many would argue that this blunder is largely responsible for Reddit’s subsequent dominance of this space.
The maximum exposure of submission on Reddit your goal should naturally be to reach the front page.
Now if you ask for any Reddit users, the average Reddit user will tell you, that the most effective method of accumulating karma is to copy and steal from others.
Unfortunately, their cynicism appears to be justified. A study from 2013 found that within 17 days 52% of the submissions that reached the front page had previously been posted within that same period.
Meaning that 52% of the submissions were reported while the other 48% were either original or reposts that merely fell outside the given time frame. Now, you are more likely to reach the front page by reposting a preexisting submission than if you were to post something original.
It only makes sense then only for the findings of this study to have been reposted several times over. Now for one of the most upvoted submissions of all time to be complaining about the ubiquity of reposts.
While we search Reddit we find that the word has been in use since as far back as the 18th century. The graph may go downhill it is in fact unrelated to the website.
In 2015, a user by the name of Bradbury 1920 posted a story to the /r/legal advice subreddit in which they expressed concern over some mysterious post-it notes they had found in their apartment.
The notes, which contain information, had not revealed to anyone else and they could not remember writing the notes themselves. Now before suspecting their landlord of posting the notes they consulted Reddit for advice on how to proceed.
However, user Kakkerlak offered an alternative explanation. Many users then offered to convert the VHSinto a modern file format and a few days later fire salad peach uploaded the entire feature-length version of Cry Baby Lane.
Now In less than four days, Reddit will locate a film that countless others had failed to locate in over a decade.
The interest was generated by Reddit subsequently prompted Nickelodeon to release the film on Halloween of 2011.
Back in 2014, the subreddit for the meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin decided it was time to promote the currency on the world stage.
One user had the obvious answer. Winter sports.
You see, the Jamaican bobsled team had to raise some $80,000 to compete in the 2014 Winter Olympics and so the Dogecoin community stepped up to the challenge and donated some $30,000 worth of Dogecoins.
Then a few months later, the whole community came together once more to sponsor yet another race.
Dogecoin will sponsor a NASCAR race car by raising some $55,000 in a week.
9. Twiter – 330 million MAUs
In the list of most popular social media apps, we have to include Twitter. As it has now 330 Monthly active users, it becomes one of the most popular social media platforms.
In February 2006, four people got an idea to create a platform for sharing short text messages online. At that time, after Facebook has come, many social media platforms were built to compete with Facebook.
So they also try to create something like social media, where a person can share short text messages on the internet. Because they don’t create like Facebook, while Facebook already exists and they have gathered a huge audience base.
The four people who got the idea was, Jack Dorsey, Ev Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. The idea of sharing messages online was very unique, so without wasting any time they started working on their idea.
In March 2006, They launched Twitter, a short message sharing social media. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet.
In March 2007, Twitter able to have a decent amount of monthly active users. The users love the simple design interface of sharing text was feels good.
In June 2008, Twitter launched a verification program. Because of these celebrities can verify their Twitter account, so that they can have an additional highlight.
In April 2010, Twitter acquired app development of 8-bits. now Twitter has mobile apps for ios, android, blackberry, windows phone, and Mozilla’s.
In November 2013, Twitter opens on the new york stock exchange with a valuation of $31 Billion. Many Investors thought that Twitter could be a failed project, while there are lots of social media platforms online.
Today, Twitter has more than 330 million monthly active users, which makes this app the most popular social media app.
10. Pinterest – 330 million MAUs
In 2010, Pinterest launched, and the creator of this site Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp, who are ex-Google ex-Facebook techies.
They have created a social app, which allows a person to bookmark images that they find around the internet.
Pinterest is an online social media network for users, so they can bookmark images they find online. By pinning them to their boards, we can range from recipes to weddings, to home remodeling.
The users can share their ideas on boards with friends or all Pinterest users. Users can find new ideas by following friends, influencers, and brands, or simply by searching Pinterest’slarge user base.
Pinterest has 330 million monthly users and it’s a group of users that is mostly women.
So it’s not a very bad group, but it is very favorable for advertisers who are trying to reach consumers who are going to spend money.
Pinterest makes money from its users in one simple way: advertising. Like all social media networks, Pinterest makes money from advertisements.
So it was challenging in this space is competing against Facebook and Google which basically control the digital advertising market.
Pinterest sells promoted pins to their advertisers, making three dollars per user last year. Advertisers pay money for an ad to surface in their desired audience’s home feed or at the top of search results.
These promoted pins appear in a variety of formats: a standard still images pin, a small or large video, a promoted app, or an image slideshow. Also, Pinterest has hundreds of retail partners like Ulta Beauty, Lowe’s, and Wayfair.
Shopping ads invite users to click on the ad and purchase the product. The ad can appear in users’ feeds when they’re in one of those partners’ stores. In most cases, Pinterest users go on the app when they’re planning some big sort of event.
So they might be doing a house renovation, they’re planning their wedding, they’re going on a big trip. That’s when they turn to use the app. So it’s not the kind of app that you open daily.
However, If you are using it, then you’re probably very likely to spend money. Pinterest’s value at IPO is down from its last private valuation of $12 billion four years ago.
For 2020 Pinterest valuation is about $17 billion. However, in 2015 some projections came out that had them making about $2.8 billion in this past year. So they are making money.
However, till now they haven’t reached so that some folks thought it had. Pinterest took off with rapid growth in2012 but expansion has tapered off, largely because of what employees told CNBCis a work culture that’s slow when it comes to making decisions.
I spoke with twenty former Pinterest employees and they described to me the culture. This is a place where a person nice to each other. So it will be a cool place to work, however, things get done very slowly.
One former person said to me that, it was done at a glacial pace. And that’s because rather than giving folks direct feedback, they’re essentially just doing meeting after meeting to get everyone to buy-in on a project before they move forward with it.
Pinterest is part of a big ocean of tech companies, which is expected to go public this year. Now it is listed as “PINS” on the New York Stock Exchange.
11. Snapchat – 320 million MAUs
Now we are going to talk about Snapchat. This app was very controversial and behind it, many stories are have taken place.
Snapchat was created for image messaging and multimedia app. Three students from Stanford University created this app called Snapchat.
After a very slow start, it now has more than 320 million monthly active users. They started a company with a former student, Bobby Murphy.
In 2011 they launch a site called Picaboo, they amassed a total of 127 users by the end of the summer. After some time, an argument caused Spiegel and Murphy to remove Brown from the company and the two of them relaunched the app with a new name, Snapchat.
Later that year. It Becomes very popular for school kids as they could text during class with no evidence of anything being sent. The growth of this social media platform suddenly increased.
Users like the app for its features and stickers. Because of these apps, we can make our faces like cartoons. The concept of this app was so unique, that it doesn’t take that much time to be one of the most popular social media platforms.
People always love to use something unique and interesting, and people found interesting and uniques feature inside of Snapchat. That’s why Snapchat becomes popular, especially for teenagers.
Pinterest able to gain 100,000 users by April 2012 and was incurring large server costs. Many investors invested money into this app, and as soon as they did, Spiegel dropped out of Stanford just weeks before graduating and focus on full time on Snapchat.
By May 2013, there were 150 million snaps being sent per day. In November, Spiegel reportedly rejected an offer from Mark Zuckerberg of $3 Billion.
Now Snapchat has over 320 million monthly active users. It proved to be a wise decision as less than a year later, Snapchat was valued at $20 billion.
Conclusion
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