Most Popular Social Media Apps and Sites In 2024
By
Gillian Harper
|
Mar 6, 2024 |
Mobile Apps
“Why are we trying to measure social media like a traditional channel anyway? Social media touches every facet of business and is more an extension of good business ethics.” – Erik Qualman, author of “Socialnomics.
This is the reason marketing pros harness the power of social media to enhance brand awareness, engage users, and maximize conversion. More than 62% of the world’s population is using 5-6 social channels to socialize and nurture relationships with friends and others. It is essential to identify which type of social media applications are the right fit for your business.
For social media marketers, it’s necessary to figure out the social media marketing platforms that the target audience is using the most and how many social apps they can manage for social marketing. See the most used social media applications in 2024, along with the user base in millions.
Understanding businesses’ social media marketing needs, a list of top social media apps is created that have worked for leading brands and bring success to your business as well.
Table of Contents
Top 13 Social Media Apps and Websites to Look Out For
The list of top social media applications and websites is created based on the active user base because millions of users cannot help businesses unless they are actively using respective social applications. Create your social media marketing plan based on target users’ preferences for following social apps.
Founded in 2004, Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms that has changed the game of socialization and connecting with people to date. With 37% of the world’s population are Facebook users, which is nearly 3 million users, are actively using the platform for different purposes. It’s a great opportunity for millions of businesses to tap into the social media market.
The US businesses are devoting 20% of their marketing budget to social media marketing, which has continuously risen in the last decade.
More than 8 million active advertisers use Facebook to promote their business, and nearly every Facebook ads reach 2.1 billion people, which is a big number. It concludes businesses can market their product and services on Facebook organically with text, images, or video content sharing consistently. The meaningful conversation brings the brand into the limelight and thus drives more traffic.
The cross-platform instant messaging service app is used by nearly 2 billion users across 180 nations worldwide. One of the top social media platforms is an inexpensive alternative to carrier-billed text messaging services for sending international messages or group chat. Going beyond sending messages to close ones, the launch of WhatsApp business in 2018 is good news for businesses to easily and quickly reach out to a large user base.
There are over 1.2 billion WhatsApp business users, which is expected to increase by 14% in 2025, indicating that businesses are using the social application at scale. The platform is leveraged for sending updates to customers regarding order status and providing instant customer support. Uber, wish, MMT, booking.com, and iFood are using WhatsApp business to provide unmatched customer support to their customers.
YouTube
The video-sharing platform is watched by 95% of the global internet population as a localized version of YouTube is available in 100 countries in 80 languages. The social media platform will have more than 2.70 billion active users in 2024 who are using it to search and watch videos daily, just like Google’s search engine.
Businesses also use the most used social media platform for marketing purposes by creating a YouTube channel for their brand and publishing videos regularly as a part of their marketing strategy. YouTube SEO helps businesses increase the visibility of their videos organically. With YouTube advertising, the videos are easily discoverable and help increase users’ reach.
The fourth most visited social media platform is Instagram, that’s used by 1.4 billion users in 2024 every month regardless of the device they are using. The one of the most popular social media platforms sums up nearly 30% of global internet users. Instagrammers willingly share pictures, short stories, reels, and live videos to showcase their products or services.
Businesses use Instagram to promote products or services by creating a business profile on Instagram where they post content regarding their offerings and also publish user-generated content to make the world aware of their performance. Third-party tools facilitate scheduling Instagram posts so that they get published after a pre-determined interval. The visual effect of the social posting increases traffic and sales of the brand offerings.
Twitter (X)
The real-time micro-blogging platform, renamed as ‘X’ platform, boasts a user base that has grown to 335 million active users. The social app facilitates video and voice call options, messaging, mini-programs, and payment services. The platform emphasizes sharing real-time information in the form of posts related to entertainment, politics, news, and others in 280 characters in a free account, while 4,000 characters per tweet for the users subscribed to X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue).
X has become the best place for customer service-related interactions that are occurring in millions every month. It has helped businesses gain impressive results in terms of higher customer satisfaction and reduced cost per resolution, which is nearly 1/6th of call center interaction.
The job search engine platform is one of the trending social media platforms that has evolved into a full-fledged professional networking platform with 424 million users actively using LinkedIn. Not only do HR persons share job requirements or candidates post for the job, but the industry experts share relevant content and strengthen networking. In addition to increasing access to top talent, the platform is leveraged by businesses for generating thought leadership.
Businesses are creating LinkedIn pages to improve their credibility. Also, access to advanced features with premium subscriptions redefining business success. It includes gaining insights about people looking at business page profiles, connecting with anyone on LinkedIn using InMail messages, expanding profile views, and more.
Snapchat
The image and video messaging app developed in 2011 is now used by 10.1 percent of internet users. It is estimated that the platform will reach over 500 million monthly active users by 2024. it features stories that are later copied by many social platforms, allowing users to add images and videos to the stories that are added to their memory.
Businesses also leverage Stories features to increase users’ interest in the brand. The growing user base of Snapchat, especially teenagers, makes the platform good for businesses looking to target teens.
The image search social platform with 574 million users actively using Pinterest matters a ton to social media marketers. 96% of pinners look to Pinterest for browsing, discovering, and buying new products. It’s because most of the users pin photos (Related to fashion, gardening, beauty, and DIY) linked with product pages or websites.
Targeting solutions from Pinterest helps businesses reach out to the target audience effortlessly. Auto-targeting helps showcase ads to the hyper-targeted audience. Pinterest trends tool helps businesses gain user insights and plan for marketing campaigns accordingly. It makes good sense to use the popular social media platform to market and improve brand exposure.
Tiktok
The short-form video-sharing app a Chinese company created is highly popular compared to Google. The platform has been downloaded more than 4 billion times and is actively used by 1.8 billion users globally in 2024. TikTok has high usage across all regions, but the Asia Pacific region, which doesn’t include India and China, has more than 690 million users.
With 1.3 billion in revenue generation, businesses are leveraging the platform to market their products or services effectively, as short-form videos are easily digestible and quickly viewed by users. Using the catalog of music snippets, sound effects, and filters, the video is made more appealing, which makes users interested in the brand.
WeChat is a product of China’s IT company Tencent that enjoys the virtue of being actively used by 1.427 billion users monthly? 83% of the WeChat users are from China itself. With the launch of WeChat mini programs within the WeChat ecosystem, the annual transactions of Tencent grew by 600%.
Going beyond instant messaging service, WeChat allows users to shop, buy groceries, pay bills, book taxis, transfer money, and much more. Businesses can use WeChat to take their business online in China, especially because Facebook and X platforms are already banned.
Telegram
The cloud-based messaging service was founded in 2013 to provide an alternative to WhatsApp that allows users to share all types of content and calls while accessing accounts from multiple devices. The platform also boasts multi-data center infrastructure and encryption that makes data more secure. It has made many users switch to Telegram from WhatsApp.
Businesses are creating bots to use Telegram for customer support services. Telegram also features the ability to broadcast to 2 million people at once, which businesses use strategically for dynamic marketing and to drive sales.
Quora
Quora is a well-known community that displays questions and answers that serve as a good repository of information for people to find on the web and applications. Questions and answers listed in Quora are voted on, reviewed, rated, and shared, which highlights the value that answers add to the industry.
Businesses use Quora for branding purposes by creating a Quora page and asking employees to answer questions related to their products or services. There’s an ad platform that is leveraged to advertise products or services and increase their reach to the customers actively looking for the same.
Reddit, built by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, is labeled as the front page of the internet because of the information related to the latest events, in-depth discussions, and celebrity AMA events shared. Users upload photos, write posts, and add links to other search engines, which Redditors organize under different subreddits. When the posts receive a lot of views, it’s featured on the front page.
Businesses can use subreddits of the top social media marketing platform to their benefit by making the brand a part of the subreddit, which helps bring a significant share of users’ engagement. Well, self-promotion is implausible, but businesses can engage the users with question-answer sessions, tips sharing, or taking part in the discussion. Reddit also provides an opportunity to advertise to bring exposure.
Define Social Strategy With Selected Social Apps
Putting all eggs in one basket or being everywhere all at once is not an intelligent decision for modern businesses. The same goes with social media marketing where businesses need to market the business on those social platforms where the target audience is active. Initially, it’s good to market the business on 3-4 platforms socially and then gradually expand on more social applications to keep things manageable. Here, getting into the details of social media applications helps a ton.
Businesses can take the help of social media marketing companies as their experts provide the best assistance from data-driven social strategy creation to final execution. Lend a hand of social media professionals to achieve the best results in 2024 with social efforts.
Gillian Harper
| Mar 6, 2024
A professionally engaged blogger, an entertainer, dancer, tech critic, movie buff and a quick learner with an impressive personality! I work as a Senior Process Specialist at Topdevelopers.co as I can readily solve business problems by analyzing the overall process. I’m also good at building a better rapport with people!
