Social media networking websites are a very important resources for every businesses that are looking to promote their brands on the web. These platforms are very easy to use and many of them even have paid promotion options for businesses that want to reach maximum number of new audiences. To properly use the power of social media sites you must to know the most popular and well known social media networking sites and recognize the ones that work best for your online business.
To make this simple for you, we listed 15 most popular and widely known social media platforms so you can now make informed online marketing decisions.
Most Popular Social Media Websites in 2024
Facebook is the biggest and most popular social media platform on the Internet, in terms of total number of active users as well as brand recognition. Launched on 4th February, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and his roommates, within short span of 12 years Facebook has managed to gather more than 1.71 billion monthly active users and this undoubtedly makes it one of the easiest and best channels for connecting family, friends as well other people from all over the world with your business or a person. It is roughly calculated that more than 1 million small and med-sized organizations use the platform to promote their business.
You might be thinking that restricting your posts to 140 characters is not a good way to promote your brand, but you will be surprised to know that this social media channel has more than 313 million active monthly users, 1 billion monthly unique visits who make utilize of the 140 character limit to pass on information. Businesses and organisations can use Twitter to connect with potential clients, answer queries, release latest information. Twitter was founded on July 2006, and has its headquarters in San Francisco, United States.
Founded on 14 December of 2002, and launched on May 5, 2003, LinkedIn is hands-down the another most reputed social media platform for professional networking. This website is available in 24 different languages and as of March 2016 it has over 433 million registered users. LinkedIn is excellent mean for people looking to link with people in same industries, networking with local businesses, professionals and demonstrating business related information and data.
Making its first appearance in the early summer of 2011, Google+ became one of the fastest growing social networking platform the web has ever seen. After failing many times already with Orkut, Google Buzz and Google Wave etc., the search leader finally got success at building something that stuck... Nobody actually needed another Facebook copy, so Google plus had always been widely mauled for being a social platform that nobody really used. Late in 2015, they redesigned it and rolled out a brand new Google+ to put more force on its Communities and Collections attributes to help differentiate the channel a bit extra and give current users more of what they exactly needed.
YouTube — the largest and widely popular video sharing website — was created on 14 February 2005, by three former employees of PayPal. It was later bought by Google in November 13, 2006 for $1.65 billion. YouTube has more than 1 billion website visitors every month and is the second most popular and largest search engine behind Google.
Founded on March 2010, Pinterest is a relatively newbie in the social media arena. This channel contains of digital bulletin boards where organisations and businesses can pin their images as well as content. In September 2015 Pinterest made a statement that it had acquired 100 million active users. Small organisations whose target audience and traffic is mostly made up of female should undoubtedly invest in Pinterest as more than fifty percent of its visitors are female.
Similar to Pinterest, Instagram is a visual social media sharing platform. The website, founded on 6th day of October, 2010, has now more than 500 million (as of June 2016) monthly active users and is owned by Facebook, No.1 social networking Platform. More than 95 percent of Instagram users also use Facebook regularly.
Tumblr is a microblogging and another social networking site and one of the most toughest to use social networking channels.. The channel enable various different post formats, including quote sharing, content sharing, chatting, video, image and photo sharing as well as audio sharing, so you are never restricted in the type of content that you can share on this platform. Tumblr was launched by David Karp in February 2007.
Flickr (pronounced Flicker) is an online image/photo and video sharing platform that was founded by Ludicorp on February 10, 2004 (12 years), and later acquired by Yahoo on March 20, 2005. The platform is widely popular with users who share and embed photographs. As of October 2015, Flickr had more than 112 million active users. An average of one million images are shared every day on Flickr.
WhatsApp Messenger is an instant messaging platform for Android phones, windows phones, smartphones, Computer's and tablets. The application depends on the Internet to send and receive photos, texts, audio and video files as well as messages to other users that have installed the WhatsApp on their devices. Launched on January 2010, WhatsApp Inc. was bought by Facebook Inc. on February 19, 2004, for approximately $19.3 billion. Today, more than 1 billion people people in over 180 countries use this platform to communicate with their friends, family, loved ones and even clients.
Quora is a question & answer community where questions and queries are asked, answered, modified and maintained by its community of users. The company was created in June 2009, and the community was made accessible to the public on 21th June, 2010. Quora was discovered by two former employees of Facebook, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever.
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine ( type of Search Engine) that searches and recommends content for its users. More than 25 million active users use StumbleUpon for business, personal, entertainment and information. Additionally, 80,000+ publishers, business brands, and other online marketers have regularly used StumbleUpon’s premium Discovery platform to advertise their businesses.
Launched more than a decade ago in November 2004 (13 years ago), Digg is a news aggregator with a curated homepage that picks stories and information specifically for the Internet users, The topics list is very wide from trending business issues,political issues to science to viral web related issues and anything in between. Digg also supports sharing of information and content to other well known social media networks such as Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter etc.
Which your favourite Social Media Website? Do you want to add any other site to our Social Media Sites list?
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