The post Social Media Statistics 2021: Top Networks By the Numbers appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout.
Looking for the latest social media statistics? Want to know which social media networks and apps are the most popular in 2021?
Whether you’re building a presentation, a pitch, or you’re just plain curious, I’ve done my best to search the entire internet for all the juicy social media statistics you could possibly need.
All in one place, always updated so that you know exactly where to go to find the latest and greatest stats about popular social media platforms.
Based on the findings, I’ve also ranked each network (1-10) according to the active user base and usage data.
You can use this information to help guide your marketing efforts, determine which social channels to focus on, and inform your social media strategy.
Bonus: Grab the full infographic at the bottom of this post to share on your site!
To make it super easy for you here’s a convenient Table of Contents so that you can quickly navigate to the stats that you’re looking for:
Facebook statisticsYouTube statisticsWhatsApp statisticsInstagram statisticsReddit statisticsTwitter statisticsSnapchat statisticsLinkedIn statisticsPinterest statisticsTumblr statisticsGoogle+ statisticsPeriscope statistics
If you find anything in this article that is outdated or inaccurate and you can provide a credible source, please use the comments section to let me know!
Now, without further ado, lets get into it!
Facebook Statistics
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and launched in 2004. During creation, Facebook was only limited to Harvard students but was later available to everyone above 13 years old as long as you had a valid email address.
Now, after 15 years of existence, Facebook has become, by far, the largest social network in the world.
It has also become the most important social media site for marketers despite declining organic reach. Facebook marketing takes up a significant amount of digital ad spend in 2021.
And when it comes to social media statistics, Facebook tends to be the standard that all other networks are now compared to.
With that said, here are some of the most current Facebook statistics:
As of June 2019, Facebook reports an estimated 2.4 billion Monthly Active Users.Facebook also says it has 1.6 billion Daily Active Users.88% of Facebook’s user activity is from a mobile device.The average amount of time a users spends on Facebook every day is 58 minutes.There are over 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook every day.On average, 5 Facebook accounts are created every second.Approximately 30% of Facebook users are aged between 25 and 34 years.Facebook video is still in high demand with approximately 8 billion video views per day.
Most of these stats I found while reading through Facebook’s quarterly reports. I’m also constantly keeping my eye on the Facebook Newsroom for any breaking news and statistics announcements.
It’s worth noting that I could have added Facebook Messenger to this list, but due to the fact that most users still believe the two platforms to be the same, I decided to leave it out.
YouTube Statistics
YouTube was created by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim (former PayPal employees) in 2005. It’s considered the 3rd most popular website worldwide.
As far as social networks go, it’s ranked number two.
After 14 years of existence, here’s a look a some mind-blowing YouTube statistics:
Currently YouTube has more than 1.9 billion logged-in visits every month.149 million people login to YouTube daily.The average duration of a YouTube visit is 40 minutes.Viewers are spending an average of 1 hour per day watching YouTube videos.On average, 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute on YouTube.There are over 5 billion video views each day.
Many of these stats came straight from either the YouTube Blog or their Press page.
WhatsApp Statistics
WhatsApp is an instant messaging application for smartphones that comes with an end to end encryption. It was founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton in 2009 and later bought by Facebook in 2014.
While some may mistakenly leave it out of the social media statistics studies, it’s absolutely one of the social networking titans, IMO.
In the 10 years since its inception it has achieved the following stats:
WhatsApp is estimated to have approximately 1.5 billion monthly active users.There are now over 1 billion daily active users on WhatsApp.On average, 1 million people register on WhatsApp daily.Approximately 60 billion texts daily are sent.
Since WhatsApp doesn’t divulge any statistical data publicly (that I could find), all of these stats were found through third-party research.
Instagram Statistics
Instagram was created Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom in 2010. It was mainly meant to enable sharing of pictures and videos, both publicly and privately. It had been since acquired by Facebook in 2012.
After 9 years of its existence, take a look at some of these fascinating Instagram statistics:
Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users.There are more than 600 million daily active users.There are now 500 million daily Stories users.Since its creation, more than 40 billion photos have been shared.On average, 95 million photos are uploaded daily on Instagram.There are approximately 4.2 billion likes per day.Most Instagram users are between 18 to 29 years of age with 32% of Instagram users being college students.
Some of these statistics were found on the Instagram Press page while others were found through third-party demographic research.
Bonus: Are you creating Instagram content? Make sure you grab my free Instagram Image Templates.
Twitter Statistics
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in March of 2006. It was an experiment that quickly became a messaging addiction for many.
It’s one of my personal favorite social networks. And, if you know how to use Twitter right, it can be a big contributor to your social media success.
What started as a simple way to post status updates via text message has become one of the most popular go-to sources for what’s happening in the world in real time. In Twitter’s own words:
[Twitter is] what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about right now.
In its 13 years of existence, here are some of the noteworthy Twitter statistics:
Nowadays Twitter has more than 330 million monthly active users.There are 134 million daily active users or at least that’s how many “monetizable” daily active users (mDAU) according to Twitter.Of their monthly active users, 68 million MAU are form the United States.The number of mDAU from the US is 26 million.Close to 460,000 new twitter accounts are registered every day.Twitter users are posting 140 million tweets daily which adds up to a billion tweets in a week.Each twitter user has on average 208 followers.550 million accounts are reported to have at least sent a tweet.
I have dug through countless (and insanely boring) earnings reports to find these stats. Most recently the Twitter Q1 2019 Earnings Report was what informed most of the above data.
Now, even though Twitter is actually tied (so far as we know) with Reddit for Monthly Active Users, I’ve decided that Twitter should take the higher spot on the list because of mainstream adoption. I’d love to see some Daily Active User stats for Reddit though to see if they pull past Twitter.
Reddit Statistics
Reddit is a discussion and web content rating website. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman from the University of Virginia in 2005.
And while it isn’t receiving anywhere near as much press buzz, it is a thriving and vibrant community of people. Many of them total trolls, but hey, trolls are people too.
It’s also been known to completely tank websites by sending enormous, and unsustainable amounts of web traffic when things hit the front page. So, be sure to use it for your own blog posts with caution.
In the 14 years it’s been around, it has accomplished the following:
Reddit has approximately 330 million monthly active users.It’s estimated that Reddit gets over 14 billion views per month.There have been more than 853,000 subreddits.It has more than 138,000 active communities.On average, there are 25 million votes on Reddit daily.The average time length of reddit visit is 13 minutes.
A lot of these statistics can be found if you search through their advertiser or press pages.
LinkedIn Statistics
LinkedIn is a professional networking service that was founded in 2002 but later launched in 2003.
It is officially the oldest social network on this list.
And although it is the oldest, it’s definitely struggled to grow its user base over the years. This is mostly due to the professional nature of the network.
It started as a place to simply keep your resume updated and didn’t really turn into a full-on social network until Facebook was well into its prime.
Since launching 16 years ago, it can boast the following user stats:
LinkedIn has over 560 million registered users.It is estimated that LinkedIn has approximately 303 million monthly active users.5.3 million new accounts per month are created on LinkedIn.There are over 30 million company pages.The average visit duration is about 10 minutes.Of all the users, 57% are male whereas 43% of the users are females.
LinkedIn has always been a bit cryptic in releasing usage statistics, but a few of the above points can be found on their About page.
Snapchat Statistics
Snapchat is a multimedia mobile application which was created by Bobby Murphy, Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown in 2011.
It started as a private messaging app that gave users the ability to create “snaps” or messages that would self-destruct (be automatically deleted) after being viewed. Unlike all the other social media apps and networks in which you had to manually delete posts you’ve shared.
For many, this was empowering because they didn’t have to worry about sending something that they’d regret years down the road.
For others, it just seemed like a breeding ground for sexting and “unscrupulous” behavior that people wanted to hide.
When Snap, Inc. became a publicly traded company, it decided to evolve into calling itself a “camera company.” Very few people understand that decision.
In that short 8 years, here’s what the mobile messaging app has accomplished by way of user stats:
Snapchat has approximately 301 million monthly active users.Snapchat also reports 109 million daily active users (a downward trend).Of those daily active users, 77 million are from the United States.60% of these snapchat users are aged between 18 and 34 years.Snapchat is competing closely with its rival, Facebook, by reporting more than 10 billion video views daily.Approximately 3 billion snaps are created every day.Snapchat users aged 25 years and above spent an average of 20 minutes on snapchat daily while those below 25 years spent on average 30 minutes.It’s estimated that it would take you more than 950 years to watch all snaps made in a day.
Most of the data was found digging through Snap Inc. quarterly earnings reports. I wouldn’t recommend it–unless you’re literally read everything else there is to be read on the internet first.
Pinterest Statistics
Pinterest is a mobile application that enables you to find information on the World Wide Web. It was founded by Evan Sharp, Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra in 2010.
And Pinterest will be the first to tell you that it is not a social media platform. However, 99% of the people you talk to about with will consider it one. Sorry, Pinterest.
It took some time for Pinterest to get on the social media marketing map, but it eventually showed itself to be a very powerful traffic driver.
And although it took Peg Fitzpatrick a couple years to get me on Pinterest, once I finally took her advice, I was a firm believer in the power of the platform. While it may not have the highest number of active users, the website traffic potential is through the roof.
While it developed a strong reputation for being mostly used by women, men have begun flocking to the network, probably thanks to Jeff Sieh at Manly Pinterest Tips.
In its 9 years, it has achieved the following milestones:
Pinterest has 291 million monthly active users.70 million of it’s active users are from the United States.The average Pinterest user visit lasts 14 minutes.The total number of Pinterest pins is more than 175 billion.The total number of Pinterest boards are approximately 1 billion.In a day, Pinterest is visited by 2 million users who save shopping pins on their boards.
Some of these stats were found on the official Pinterest Blog while others had to be sourced through third-party data studies. And now since Pinterest is a publicly traded company, they also have quarterly earnings reports that anyone can view.
Tumblr Statistics
This is a micro-blogging and social networking website which was launched in 2007 by David Carp.
You won’t typically see Tumblr included in social media statistics because many people may think of it as a “blogging” platform. However, I believe it absolutely fits into the realm of social networks and should be counted among the top social media sites.
It’s gone through a lot of evolutions, acquisitions, and changes, but it has stuck around for a long time. It’s also developed a unique culture of users.
In its 12 years, it has accomplished the following user milestones:
Tumblr has a total of over 452 million blogs.There are approximately 371 million monthly visits.Tumblr has more than 166 billion published posts.There are approximately 7.2 million new blogs created each month.Approximately 46% of Tumblr visitors are aged between 18 and 34 years.Of all the visitors, 52% are male and 48% female.
Of all the listed sites, Tumblr seems to be the most transparent as this data was pretty easy to get.
Bonus Reading: Check out my list of the best Social Media Tools for professional social media marketers.
Other Social Networks
This section contains social networks that were previously a part of the primary list. I wanted to preserve these for historical purposes even though they no longer are included in the primary list.
Google+ Statistics
Google plus is a social network owned by Google. It was launched in 2011 and was meant to be a social layer across all of Google’s products. The purpose and objective of the social network has changed a lot over the years, and in early 2019 has been officially sunset.
In its eight years of existence it had accomplished some interesting milestones:
At its high-point, there were approximately 395 million monthly active users on Google+.Google+ was estimated to have over 2 billion registered users world-wide.28% of Google plus users were aged between 15 and 34 years.United States alone made up 55% of all the users.73.7% of the users were male while 26.3% were female.It is estimated that on average, a Google+ user will spent 3 minutes and 46 seconds per visit.
Some of this info was gained through reading the official Google Blog (before they got rid of the Google+ blog) as well as many other third-party research and data studies.
Unfortunately, it seems Google was in no way interested in the social media statistics game and has kept much of its data private.
Periscope Statistics
Periscope is a live video streaming app that was created by Joe Bernstein and Kayvon Beykpour and before even launching was bought by Twitter in 2015.
It quickly dwarfed its predecessor, Meerkat, and became very popular among live-streaming apps. I even tried it for a while and came up with a handful of Periscope pro tips that you might want to check out.
In its short 3 years after launch Periscope has accomplished the following milestones:
There are over 9.3 million live streams monthly on Periscope.Periscope has over 10 million registered users.Daily active users are approximated to be 1.9 million.The number of active users on Periscope using android is 1.2 million.There have been 200 million broadcasts on periscope to date.On average, 350,000 hours of videos are streamed every day.
Twitter doesn’t reveal many of Periscope’s usage stats, but you can dig through their quarterly reports and get some interesting info.
Social Media Statistics Infographic
What’s that you say? You wish there were a giant infographic that you could share out to your social networks and embed on your own blogs?
Well, didn’t I just think of everything when I created the following for you?
If you’d like to embed this infographic on your own website, just copy the code below:
<a href=”https://dustinstout.com/social-media-statistics/” target=”_blank”><img src=”https://dustinstout.com/free-resources/social-media-statistics-infographic.jpg” alt=”Social Media Statistics 2018 Infographic” /></a><br /><em>Image courtesy of <a href=”https://dustinstout.com” target=”_blank”>Dustin Stout</a></em>
Final Thoughts On Social Media Statistics
It’s taken me a long time to track down these social media stats. I’ve spent countless hours trolling through quarterly earnings reports, advertizer informational documents, platform about pages, and every official documented record of stats I could.
However, some networks just don’t care to give any statistics out anymore. So I turned to other third-party data sources. If you find anything listed above to be a bit off, do let me know.
But I wanted to take a moment here and say one very important thing:
It doesn’t really matter how many users any social network has.
You know what really matters?
How many people are you able connect with in a relevant way?
If there are 2.4 billion people are active on Facebook, but none of them have any interest in the stories you’re telling (or you can’t reach them)— there is zero value in that network.
If there are 300 people using MySpace and every single one of them are interested in your story— it’s suddenly more valuable than Facebook.
I’m just using these as extreme examples, and, of course, they’re not accurate. There’s no way Myspace has 300 users.
The point is this— don’t get caught up in the “who has the most active users” game. It’s even more meaningless than your follower count. Your social media presence is about serving your target audience, not everyone in the world.
Bonus reading: Don’t just “boost” your social media engagement, learn how to scale it. That’s where the real power of social media channels and influencer marketing lives.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from working with a diverse set of clients, it’s this— target market trumps mass market.
So when you’re considering putting time, energy and resources into your social media marketing don’t get caught up in the big numbers. Do your market research and know which networks your target market is actively engaging on.
If you need help deciding where your time and effort is best spent on social media, you can always drop me a line.
And also, if you have any interesting social media statistics you’d like to add, just throw them in the comments along with your source and I’ll take a look at adding them.
Feature image courtesy of SFIO CRACHO via Shutterstock.
The post Social Media Statistics 2021: Top Networks By the Numbers appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout. If you are reading this on a website that is NOT dustinstout.com, it is STOLEN.
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