Before launching into your social media marketing plan for your ecommerce business, you need to first get an overview of the distribution of social media usage. Given the growing penetration and usage of social media these days, the platforms where you can find most of your target audience would be a good place to start your marketing efforts. To do that, you need to find out which social media platform has the largest user base.
The latest statistics show that Facebook continues to reign strong as the king of social media, with 2.498 billion active users as of April 2020. That means that nearly two out of every three of the 3.81 billion active social media users are active Facebook users.
Facebook’s statistics and its social media ranking say it all. Not only is it the social media platform with the most active users, but at 58 minutes per day, it is also the platform on which users spend the most time, compared to some of the other most popular social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter.
Second on the list of the most popular social media platforms in 2020 is YouTube with 2 billion active users – 80 percent the number of Facebook users.
Given that 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide, it may seem like an uphill task to get your video noticed. But also consider these YouTube statistics: 1 billion hours of video on YouTube are watched daily and 90 percent of consumers say they discover new brands and products through YouTube.
The third- and fourth-most popular social media platforms are WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, with 2 billion and 1.3 billion active users respectively. Unlike Facebook and YouTube, they are classified as a platform for messaging, chat, and/or calls.
Further down the list are WeChat, China’s version of WhatsApp, with 1.165 billion active users, and Instagram with 1 billion active users, in fifth and sixth place respectively. Despite being relatively high on the list of the most popular social media platforms, their combined number of active users is still lower than that of Facebook’s.
These statistics paint a clear picture of Facebook’s dominant social media ranking. Of the six most popular social media platforms, more than half are Facebook entities – namely Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.