Social Media Platforms are, nowadays, playing a tremendous role in boosting traffic to your sites(brand, business, and online store), providing feedback, increasing sales, turning visitors into potential customers, and a lot of other activities when it comes to online. As the Internet grows, more and more people rely on social media sites to spread business, products, and services and leverage its power to manage the online business while they are at home. It does not matter whether you run a brand or business, shop online, broadcast campaigns, conduct surveys, or launch a digital farm, you can use the social networking sites but it is, needless to say, that using them cast a positive impact on your business and brand.
Haven’t you looked at the top brands and business platforms? They all create social accounts and engage in social media activities so as to drive more traffic to their sites, gain more insights and improve their business strategy. In other words, social media platforms are indispensable for social media marketing that has a huge impact on your products and services. Once you have hosted a site, you have to do a lot to drive more traffic to your site.
Page Contents
The List of the Most Popular Social Media Platforms
These are the list of the major social media platforms used to engage in social optimization using various ways. You can install a popular social media sharing plugin.
- YouTube
- Messenger
- Telegram
- Tumblr
- Sina Weibo
- Douban
- Qzone
- Quora
- Medium
- Vimeo
- Discord
- Line
- Viber
- Skype
- Microsoft Teams
- Kuaishou
Facebook is one of the most used social media platforms, which gives you a lot of features to interact in various ways. Mark Zuckerberg, an American entrepreneur founded Facebook in 2004. Before changing its name to Facebook it was another site called Facemash. This is also available for download as a social app which you can use on mobile and desktop. The company has developed and released a separate version of this social media site for both mobile and desktop users.
As one of the top-ranked social media platforms, Facebook is the easiest of all and it lets you create a post, upload media, add location, create an event, buy products, sell goods, run ads, and more. The editing interface is very easy. Most companies, entrepreneurs, bloggers, digital consultants, and SaaS companies use Facebook for social engagement, to drive traffic to their sites, to increase sales, and earn revenues.
Also, it lets you create groups and pages. Facebook marketing is on the increase. Thousands of companies use its ads platform to reach potential customers, grow consumers and increase earnings.
“Facebook is not only one of the top social media platforms but also a leading social media marketing platform where B2B and B2C users do lots on marketing, advertising, selling, buying, etc.”
In the list of the top social media platforms, Twitter is a popular and frequently used social networking site used by billion of users worldwide. You can use Twitter as an app on mobile devices and also it has its desktop version available in Google Play.
Twitter uses the rate(@) and hashtag(#) in its posts. Every post published on this social media site is called a tweet. It lets you create a profile, upload a logo, add a site description with a hashtag(#), post tweets, interact with the pre-published posts, etc.
Like other frequently used social media platforms, it too lets you create a post, add a description and upload media( image, audio, or video). You can add ALT text for the media so that its algorithm can read and understand what the media is. The maximum length of the Twitter ALT text is up to 1000 characters.
When you tweet a post, it lets you add up to a maximum of 280 characters or Unicode glyphs. Though originally it was limited to 160 characters but owing to frequent usage, description length, and better optimization of content, tweet length extended up to 280 characters.
About more than 76 million users of Twitter are from the United States of America. When it comes to Twitter demographics, surveys say that 37% of users are between the ages of 19 and 24.
“Twitter as one of the social media platforms does not only allow to interact with tweets in its native platform but also it is built for developers, marketers, advertisers, B2B service providers, and online users. It lets you display ads, connect its API with your site, embed tweets to third-party sites, and interact with others in several ways.”
You can use Twitter marketing to drive traffic to your site, grow your site’s popularity, build relationships with customers, increase sales, earn money, launch ads, and turn customers into buyers.
YouTube
Among the social media platforms, YouTube is a popular site in many aspects. It comes next to Google in search volume and users. Originally, it was a video casting site developed and offered by Google. It has almost all kinds of videos.
YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world, which comes next to Google. It uploads thousands of videos every second worldwide. It has a strong algorithm to provide analytics to the account holders to learn views, impressions, CTR, ads, and earnings.
You too can create a YouTube channel through a number of steps such as signing in to YouTube, creating a name, adding a description, uploading a logo with channel art, starting uploading a video or videostreaming, and publishing by adding the required metadata and proper SEO tricks.
YouTube has 2 billion monthly active users and 30 million active users every day. Over 40% of global shoppers surveyed say they have purchased products they discovered on YouTube.
“In social media marketing(SMM) and social media optimization, YouTube as one of the social media platforms plays a crucial role. The majority of the buyers when purchasing a product online, they have discovered or heard about that from YouTube.”
YouTube marketing has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and it has a crucial role in turning audiences into real customers who purchase products, learn new insights, and follow brands.
LinkedIn is an online social networking site that is business and employment-oriented. Originally launched on May 5, 2003, and since then, this has been growing steadily. Most of the users are businessmen, companies, job holders, and professional and skilled personalities on LinkedIn. It has 800+ million members worldwide. When compared with other top-ranked social media platforms or social networking sites, especially from the user’s perspective, it is found that most of the account holders in LinkedIn are of professional background.
It is available in multiple languages besides English. You can create a LinkedIn profile in 40+ languages. Like other social networking sites, it too is available as a website as well as an app to be installed onto mobile devices.
The editing interface of LinkedIn is very simple and customizable. You can write an article, add a post, add hashtags(#), upload media, send messages, share with others, like content, and post jobs or launch online events to show your expertise. As I have already said that most LinkedIn users are professional and that’s why they post jobs that you can apply for. Their algorithm is so developed that it can suggest you a job based on your profile data.
“LinkedIn marketing lets you use their built-in marketing solutions and add strategy to reach your target audience on using various ads like message ads, dynamic ads, sponsored content, and text ads and helps to grow your B2B business. On using this professional and high quality social media site, you can reach to your potential customers, grow brand awareness, increase real traffic, engage with professionals and do a lot on social media marketing. In fact, LinkedIn is very helpful in B2B lead generation”
When compared to conversion, LinkedIn comes next to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. However, in the field of marketing and social networking, it is needless to say that people of various professions can interact with others, post jobs, launch online courses, find the opportunity to connect with others, and build their careers.
Instagram is another popular photo and video sharing social media platform that was launched back in 2010. This social media site is available in 32 languages. You can use it on android devices, mobiles with iOS, and desktops. Facebook Inc, acquired this major social site in April 2012 for approximately US$1 billion.
Instagram being one of the top-notch social media platforms it too plays a vital role in online marketing, social engagement, and driving traffic to websites from social networking sites.
In order to use Instagram, you need to open an account, upload a profile photo, add required data and publish it. Once it is published, users can interact with it. It lets you upload photos, add descriptions, and categories, and publish them on the website. As a user, you can like, follow and share Instagram posts with others.
When you upload a photo into its media, look at the quality and size of the photo. The more appealing the outlook of the image, the more followers it will have. It has an easy-to-use and customizable editing interface which is beginner-friendly and hassle-free. Besides the free account, it lets you try the premium service for a more advanced editing interface, communication, feedback, and increasing followers.
“When it comes to Instagram marketing, online surveys say that it is the most popular and effective social networking channel for marketing conversion accounting for about 1.85%. This social site is the best marketing platform for many users, as it gives customers a greater visual outlook of the products or services they purchase or subscribe.”
You can even launch ads through a number of steps on Instagram for advertising your products and services. So, when compared with other social media platforms, Instagram outranks others, especially in traffic conversion.
When we are talking about the major social media platforms, Pinterest must be included in our discussion. It is a social bookmarking tool used to share images, GIFs, and short videos in the form of Pinboards. Ben Silbermann founded it in March 2010, in the United States. Now, Pinterest has 430 million global monthly active users, more than 1 billion images and it’s net worth is $11 billion.
Ben Silbermann along with his coworkers founded Pinterest, the social media website to share ideas, inspiration, projects, and ventures. It has a long history of development that went through app development for eCommerce, change in its design, collecting data from users for rebranding, collaborating with others, and finally assigning a name to it looking at its visual discovery containing a Pinboard having many pins appealing to the visitors.
Actually, it displays a number of pins which are the collection of cover images having links pointing to third-party destinations. The images of the Pinboards are optimized for visual search and discovery.
Now, Pinterest stands as one of the popular and top-ranked social media platforms consisting of billion images that seem appealing in visual outlook and feel to the customers. It has its own algorithm and searching metrics so as to work properly.
“Pinterest marketing strategy is optimized that lets you choose various types of tags, ad campaigns, CTA, and budget to lead to traffic conversion. Once you choose your parameters and start your ad campaign, it will do the rest to result in the maximum, desired output. However, the rate of Pinterest conversion is lower than that of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and it stands at 0.31%.”
WhatsApp is an internationally available messaging and calling app that uses VoIP technology to send and receive texts, messages, photos, documents, audio, and video online. Jan Koum and Brian Acton founded WhatsApp.
Do you know how many users use this social networking website? As of Feb 2022, WhatsApp has 2 billion monthly active users. The user interface is quite easy. It supports texts, messaging, audio, videos, and files. You can create groups, make payments and do a lot of work. It is available for androids, iPhones, MacOS, and desktops.
Another most important feature of this social media site is that it lets you make international calls. Whatever works you do through this is encrypted. Thus it keeps your data private and maintains privacy.
“WhatsApp Business is free to download and was built with the small business owner in mind. The app makes it easy to personally connect with your customers, highlight your products and services, and answer their questions throughout their shopping experience. Create a catalog to showcase your products and services and use special tools to automate, sort and quickly respond to messages”
WhatsApp business
Messenger
Messenger is one of the best popular messaging apps and web-based social media platforms that let its users send messages, share files, and make chat, video, audio, and instant messaging between two or more users. Actually, Meta Platforms developed it to be used as Facebook chat in 2008 but t company revamped its service in 2010 and finally launched in 2011. Using messenger, you can interact with others in various ways. This popular social networking site has more than 1.3 billion active users.
Facebook lets you use Messenger provided that you have an account in the former but there exist differences between these two social media websites. Once you have set up your account in it, you can connect with other users and send them files, photos, audio, etc.
In the list of the top-ranked social media platforms, WeChat is a popular one with 1 billion monthly active users. It was first released on 21 January 2011. Tencent and Allen Zhang developed the app for social broadcasting, instant messaging, mobile payment, and media sharing.
Like the other social media platforms, WeChat too is a free social app that is available for Android, iOS, macOS, and windows. It is an all-in-one social app for sending instant messages, media sharing, and social engagement.
As of March 2020, it had 1.2 billion active users. WeChat is the #1 social media app for Chinese citizens, as it provides a wide range of products from eCommerce to access to integrated several mini applications. Their mini program has 400 million daily active users and about 47% of Chinese merchants use it in 2020.
In China, WeChat had three ecosystems, such as (1)WeChat for messaging, (2) WeChat Pay for payment and financial transaction,s and (3)Weixin mini program.
“WeChat became one of the most popular and frequently used social media apps for providing social collaboration, payment in 17 currencies including international currencies too and integrated applications for the mini program.”
Telegram
Want to learn about Telegram? It’s a cloud-based application or service provider that facilitates instant messaging, video calling, file sharing, chatting, and VoIP over multiple user platforms including androids, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Telegram has many features like customizable layouts, color, the option to change the background, profile photos, location sharing, end-to-end encryption of chats, etc. Like other several social media platforms Telegram too lets you use its theme and chatbots. Chatbots facilitate playing games, watching videos, audio, location, documents, and status. As of April 2022, Telegram has 500 million active monthly users.
Tumblr
While making a list on social media platforms and sites, Tumblr must be included in this as it is one of the most popular American microblogging platforms having 16 billion monthly page views, 116 Alexa rank, and more than 50% of visitors are under the age of 35. It is heavily customizable which makes it stand out and distinguished from the rest. Every blog post published on this platform is a ‘Tumblr blog’.
Want to publish posts on Tumblr? Just sign up to create an account and it will provide you with a URL for that page. The design of the page is custom built-in or it lets you choose an awesome design of templates from the pre-existing themes available therein or through outside sites. Most of the posts are short and not broad, hence these posts published on this social media site are called microblogs.
Sina Weibo
Sina Weibo, the microblogging website launched by Sina corporation in 2009 in China. It does not account for profitable income but it continues to be one of the popular social media platforms for social engagement, online disclosure on various issues, and political exposure in China.
As of the third quarter of 2021, Weibo has 573 million monthly active users and 241 million daily active users. When first released, it lets users write up to 140 characters but later it expanded up to 2,000 characters. Weibo like other social media platforms allows you to share, send and upload videos. You can even buy and sell products, purchase plans for paid posting, launch ads and make live broadcasting.
“Sina Weibo is a B2C and B2B social media platform for promoting posts, content, videos, and paid ads. It even allows users to use location-based hashtags for better search optimization. In the third quarter of 2021, its total revenues resulted in $607.4 million, an increase of 30% year-over-year.”
Willing to learn about QQ? It’s a Chinese social web portal and instant messaging software app developed by Tencent about 23 years ago, in 1999. It facilitates messaging services, online shopping, microblogging, gaming, movies, and group chatting.
Though it was launched 5 years before Facebook yet underwent rigorous trials. It is optimized for both mobile and web platforms. Many Chinese companies too use QQ in the workplace to communicate and collaborate with others. Among the users, 30% are students who use this social messaging app for instant communication.
Douban
Didn’t know what is Douban? It’s one of the popular Chinese social media platforms launched on 6th March 2005, by Beijing Douwang Technolgy Co., LTD for providing communication and collaboration on social culture, lifestyle, events, and a range of services to the registered users.
The majority of the users have learned persons belonging to the middle class and living in towns, who focus more on niche-related organic content, besides reviews on books, films, music, and suggested products. Users can create their own personal FM channel free of charge but it takes to charge up to 200,000 RBM per month for creating the branded official channel.
They even create ‘Dou-lists’ containing products, and links pointing to eCommerce sites and stores. Besides, Douban lets its user make city events, online campaigns, interest-based advertising campaigns, and group-based discussions on technology, culture, photography, entertainment, travel to Tibet, etc.
Douban has over 300 million monthly active users spanning the whole country including users of all ages and professions.
QZone
In the list of the Chinese social media platforms, QZone is a popular one that Tencent created in 2005. As a social networking site, it lets its users create posts, listen to audio, watch videos, shares content, etc. It’s worth $11.2 billion that ranks 4th on the list of the nine major Chinese brands.
It has integrated with Weibo and QQ and users having registered accounts in QQ can log in to QZone. Almost it has 1 billion registered users and currently, there are 573 million active users on this social networking site on China’s mainland.
But when compared to marketing opportunities, Sina Weibo is preferable to QZone, though it offers paid services for boosting marketing.
Reddit is one of the popular social media platforms that Steve Huffman founded on June 23, 2005, and people use it to submit and share posts, content, video, text links, etc. Its headquarter is in the United States but it has a worldwide audience and users. It has URLs starting with rl that indicate that it’s a post on Reddit.
Once you log in to your account on this social networking site, you can see several posts having separate categories. Each of the categories contains different posts which can be grouped into sub-Reddits. There are more than 30 topics that you can see in the Explore menu. It has covered almost all the topics needed for social marketing and engagement.
When you post new content, text, or video on this site, you can add a category of your choice for better optimization of your post. Like other social media platforms, Reddit lets you create and launch ads for online marketing, traffic conversion, lead generation, collecting feedback, learning audience behavior, and increasing sales.
Medium
When talking about the popular social media platforms, we should include Medium as it is too a reputed social site that deals with a lot of subjects, and most of the users are professional writers, bloggers, publishers, or persons having blogging experience. It lets you create a profile, write posts add images, audio, files, etc, and publish it within the platform.
It had 236.65 million views in May of 2019 and ranked 219 in terms of traffic. Owing to having a larger audience, content on Medium gets huge traffic and audience. Even writers get paid for contributing to this social media platform. It gets somewhat between 85 to 100 million active users worldwide.
Quora
Quora is a top-ranked free question & answers platform that has launched in 2009 and became accessible for use for users in 2010. This question and answer platform contain several categories on which users can create questions, write answers and publish them on the site. It supports many languages besides English.
One of the most important features of Quora is that it lets its users write questions and answers based on certain categories matching your queries. When you write a question on it, you have to choose a certain category for more customization for readers’ access. Similarly, you can ask and add questions and request answers. However, if you find when writing a question that it already exists from before, it suggests a modification or a tweak in the question stands different from others.
Quora has more than 300 million monthly visitors and 190 million active monthly users.
Vimeo
Vimeo is another popular social media site that lets its users upload videos and interact with its users to share, comment, and watch later. It was launched by a group of filmmakers, artists, musicians, and professional hobbyists in 2004. There is another video hosting platform like YouTube but it has a lot of differences from that when it comes to marketing, content access, storage scalability, and more. Vimeo being a video hosting social media platform, it lets you upload and publish high quality videos tailored to offer some instructive, training and unique professional values to the audience. Audience and viewers can enjoy the video tutorials uploaded on this social media site, however, you can’t upload and publish unlimited videos on the free plan.
As popular social media platforms there exist differences between YouTube and Vimeo in many aspects.
Discord
Discord is another creative and engaging social networking site and app that was, first of all, released on the 13th of May, 2015. It’s available in 30 languages and runs on Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, and web browsers.
Initially, it was launched for the gamers but later on it became popular as one of the popular social media platforms for text messaging, voice calls, video calls, and file sharing using VoIP.
Discord servers allow users to collaborate on separate topics based on a separate channel. It has 150 million monthly active users, 19 active servers per week, and 4 billion server conversation minutes daily.
Nowadays, Discord is dedicated to talking and hanging out with your friends, family, and communities. There are millions of people and groups of diverse professions who spend time sharing their interests and hobbies. However, it provides safety to the users.
Line
Line is a freeware software app that provides instant messaging, text, video calls, audio calls, and sharing files on electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, etc. First of all, NHN Japan, a subsidiary of Naver Corporation released this free messaging app in June 2011.
The app uses VoIP-based technology to facilitate calling and broadcasting media over the Internet. It’s the life structure of the Japanese and it has stood next to YouTube in terms of users. It does not only provide social engagement and social feedback but also covers banking and healthcare services.
A line like other social media platforms lets you create profiles, upload media, create private channels make video calls, voice calls, etc. Besides, you can shop online, join restaurants and get updates on banking and healthcare services.
Though Line launched as a messaging app yet it continues to be the biggest social app in Japan and the most popular social platform in Thailand.
Viber
Want to know about Viber? It’s a free, instant messaging software application that uses VoIP to process messages, calls, and text on multiple user platforms including androids, iOS, macOS, Linux, and Windows. Rakuten, the Japanese multinational company developed and released this software on 2nd December 2010.
Viber is one of the top-ranked social media platforms that allow you to make voice calls, video calls, group chats, and send messages, stickers, and GIFs. You can even build your own community to share your experience, increase social engagement and grow your audience. Communications are end-to-end encrypted where none can decrypt them.
Skype
Skype is a VoIP-based telephony or telecommunications service provider that enables users to make calls, send messages, host videoconferencing, and make international calls. It was first released on August 29, 2003, and Microsoft passed a decade struggling to provide better telephony service through it.
Actually, the developer company built it to be used on macOS and windows. However, now it works on multiple platforms including iOS, too. The release of WhatsApp and Viber have decreased the popularity of Skype. The quality of service, especially, calling through this social media app is very transparent and tangible.
Microsoft Teams
The Microsoft Teams is like a social media platform that lets its users collaborate on messaging, conversations, file sharing, meetings, and video conferencing. It has 270 million monthly active users. Actually, the company developed this as a social collaborator for communication, , however, now it has turned into a popular social channel for Microsoft product users.
Microsoft also uses Yammer, and SOCL besides Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. It has also integrated with other Microsoft products, such as PowerPoint, OneDrive, etc. Microsoft Teams are best suited for larger businesses and groups having up to 10,000 members. It offers to share up to 1TB per user.
Many readers ask, “Does Microsoft have social media platforms?” Of course, the company has Microsoft Teams which works as Google Hangout. Also, they use Yammer as one of the popular social media platforms within their organization, which the company purchased in 2012.
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