Understanding the extent to which these platforms are impacting the global online community is critical to a company's social media marketing strategy. The same goes for understanding other nuances related to platform growth.
Cross-border e-commerce social platform marketing
Choosing which social network your brand focuses its marketing on is a very important decision and should not be made purely intuitively.
Sure, a particular social media platform may "feel right" for your brand, but we recommend that you consider a range of other variables before making a leap forward. Among them, "relative popularity" and "growth" are the two most important factors.
The metric we use to determine the size of a social network is "active users" – the total number of unique users currently registered on the platform. It's a metric used across the tech industry as a key metric to measure popularity, engagement, and growth.
The Flying Fish social media marketing platform was also born to solve the difficult pain points of cross-border e-commerce marketing.
1. Facebook – 2.74 billion active users
Facebook is the undisputed heavyweight champion of social media platforms. Facebook is a social media giant that not only shows the world the potential of the Internet, but also fundamentally changes the way humans communicate with each other.
Here are some other interesting facts about Facebook's use:
India is the most active country for Facebook users (290 million), the second largest in the United States (190 million) and the third in Indonesia (140 million).
In the U.S., 73% of Facebook users log in every day. 93% use Facebook every week and 98% log in at least once a month.
Although Facebook continues to criticize spreading disinformation in its role, 36 percent of U.S. citizens say they regularly use the platform's news feed.
The average U.S. user spends up to 38 minutes a day on Facebook.
2. YouTube – 2.291 billion active users
While YouTube is popular among younger audiences, YouTube also has some excellent statistics when it comes to reaching the adult population. Almost three-quarters (74%) of adults in the U.S. use YouTube. Facebook came in second with 68 percent and Instagram third with 40 percent.
YouTube
In terms of national demographics, more than 30% of YouTube traffic comes from just three countries. The United States accounted for 16.4%, contributing the most. India came in second with 9.2% and Japan took bronze with 4.8%.
3. WhatsApp – 2 billion active users
WhatsApp is one of only three social networking platforms with a user base of more than 2 billion — a milestone they'll reach in 2020. The app's recent growth rate has been surprising, with the last 1 billion users jumping up in just four years!
Because WhatsApp refuses to integrate traditional advertising into their revenue model, the platform doesn't offer the wide range of marketing options offered by many other social networks. But that doesn't mean the app won't provide huge marketing value to businesses that use it as a communication tool.
Despite the recent ill-advised updates around its privacy policy that sparked a PR disaster, WhatsApp remains the most popular mobile messaging app on the planet, beating Out Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ, Telegram and Snapchat to the top.
4. Facebook Messenger – 1.3 billion active users
Unlike WhatsApp, messenger owners have no problem bringing monetization into the core functionality of the app. As a result, Messenger provides businesses with unparalleled connections with their customers and prospects.
In terms of age, when adopting Facebook Messenger in the United States, one group is higher than the others:
13 – 17 Users account for 1.7% of app usage.
14.7% of people aged 18-24.
Users aged 25 – 34 make up 27.3% of Messenger's US user base.
People aged 35 – 44 came in second with 21%.
Users aged 45 – 51 make up 14.7% of the country's Messenger user base.
5. Instagram – 1.221 billion active users
Demographically, Instagram primarily attracts users under the age of 35, with 71% of the app's user base falling into this category.
It is also a very popular B2C marketing platform, with more than 70% of U.S. businesses actively using it as a marketing channel. Compared to its biggest competitor, Facebook, Instagram's engagement rate is incredible. Despite offering relatively similar features and engagement mechanisms, Instagram posts have an average 23% higher engagement rate than images posted on Facebook.
The U.S. and India each have 140 million users, representing the demographics of the platform's two largest countries. Brazil (99 million) came in second, Indonesia (88 million) came third, while Russia (56 million) missed the podium.
6. WeChat - 1.213 billion active users
In 2018, the proportion of mobile users between the ages of 50 and 80 in China was as high as 98.5% of WeChat registered users. And 60% of WeChat users over the age of 60 use more than half of their mobile data on the app.
7. TikTok – 689 million active users
Two years into the social media space, TikTok ranks among the top five most downloaded apps in the world. A year later it was number one. And the magnitude is not small. The fledgling social network surpassed its closest competitor, WhatsApp, with a staggering 250 million downloads.
WhatsApp differs from third-ranked Facebook in terms of downloads by just 60 million times!
In terms of its population coverage, TikTok still has a long way to go to catch up with its competitors. In the United States, 47% of the platform's user base is between the ages of 10 and 29.
8. QQ – 617 million active users
QQ's early dominance as a commercial communication platform was due to the software's excellent handling of file transfers. This creates a network effect where companies only need to use QQ because all their partners, suppliers, and customers are already using it.
Being the first to launch such a useful platform, especially in a space that actively blocks so many external cloud-based applications, laid the foundation for QQ's huge success.
9. Douyin - 600 million active users
Douyin is tikTok for Chinese audiences. Both platforms have the same parent company and the same core features, but are definitely two different apps that market to two different groups of people.
Unlike TikTok, Douyin has embraced user monetization and provided content creators with a more specific mechanism to generate revenue streams from their videos — mostly through integration with popular Chinese e-commerce platforms like Taobao.
10. Sina Weibo – 511 million active users
Sina Weibo's focus is very much on the creation, delivery, and consumption of user-generated content. It is an information hub used by businesses, journalists, influencers and ordinary people.
11. Telegram – 500 million active users
Telegram adoption increased significantly between March 2018 and January 2021. Over those three years, the app's monthly active users grew by 150 percent — from 200 million to 500 million. Only 34 months.
According to data released by Hootsuite, Android Telegram users spend more time on the app than those who use Facebook Messenger. Social media experts report that the average user spends 2.9 hours per month on Telegram, compared to 2.7 hours on Messenger.
12. Snapchat – 498 million active users
Snapchat's daily active users (DAUs) outside the U.S. and Europe are showing impressive growth.
From a demographic point of view, two statistics stand out:
59% of all U.S. Internet users between the ages of 13 and 24 use Snapchat.
Since 2016, Snapchat has been the most popular social network among teens and young adults.
13. Kuaishou - 481 million active users
Chinese like video sharing and live streaming. In fact, we find ourselves talking about a second app specifically for the Chinese market. Kuaishou is the second largest video-sharing social network in Hong Kong and currently has about 80% of active TikTok users.
Others are not listed again, these social platforms are cross-border e-commerce worth collecting and researching marketing tools.