It’s not secret at this point that Facebook Inc. has a pretty solid monopoly in the world of social media. However, have you ever thought about just how big of a monopoly this social networking giant actually has? Recent reports have revealed some statistics that are really going to shed quite a bit of light on the kind of dominance that Facebook currently enjoys and reveal how far behind other social media enterprises are lagging behind the dominant platform that pretty much everyone is using at this point.
Just the total number of users that Facebook has is quite impressive all on its own. With nearly 2.4 billion active users, Facebook is used by a sizeable chunk of the population of the entire planet, thereby making it a service that is enjoying an unprecedented amount of global popularity. However, this is not the only number that shows how absolute Facebook’s domination of the world of social media truly is. After all, the company owns a number of other services as well which includes services that it created on its own such as Messenger as well as numerous services that it acquired over the course of its lifespan such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
The important thing to remember here is that each and every one of Facebook’s properties boasts over a billion active users. Instagram crossed the billion mark, with WhatsApp and Messenger having 1.6 billion and 1.3 billion active users respectively. This cements the complete hold that Facebook has over the world of social media, one that has proven to be very tough to shake especially as far as its competitors are concerned.
The only real competitor that Facebook Inc. has comes from China, namely from Tencent Inc. which is the parent company of the popular messaging app WeChat. WeChat is basically the Chinese version of WhatsApp offered by Tencent Inc to Chinese people that are not able to use WhatsApp due to laws banning the service in the country. Tencent Inc is certainly no slouch, with WeChat boasting over 1.1 billion active users, and Tencent’s other properties such as QQ and Qzone having 823 million and 572 million active users respectively.
While these stats are quite robust and certainly respectable they still don’t come close to the numbers that Facebook enjoys which shows just how far behind any competition is. This obviously does not mean that Facebook is always going to be the dominant social media platform since things can often change far more quickly than you would initially realize but the fact of the matter is that over the past decade or so Facebook has continued to grow at a rapid pace.
Twitter was once a major competitor that Facebook had to reckon with, but now the number of active users that Twitter has does not compare at all to what Facebook has. Twitter has 330 million active users which isn’t bad at all but certainly not all that impressive when compared to Facebook’s billions. Twitter’s user count puts it on par with Reddit which is another major player in the world of social media albeit one that was never considered to be in the running to be the absolute biggest.
TikTok has made waves ever since its launch and has found an audience particularly in developing countries and the video sharing service now has over half a billion active users which might just end up giving Instagram a run for its money.
Chart courtesy of: Statista.
Read next: Users Are Wary of the Role Social Media Sites Play in Delivering the News
Just the total number of users that Facebook has is quite impressive all on its own. With nearly 2.4 billion active users, Facebook is used by a sizeable chunk of the population of the entire planet, thereby making it a service that is enjoying an unprecedented amount of global popularity. However, this is not the only number that shows how absolute Facebook’s domination of the world of social media truly is. After all, the company owns a number of other services as well which includes services that it created on its own such as Messenger as well as numerous services that it acquired over the course of its lifespan such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
The important thing to remember here is that each and every one of Facebook’s properties boasts over a billion active users. Instagram crossed the billion mark, with WhatsApp and Messenger having 1.6 billion and 1.3 billion active users respectively. This cements the complete hold that Facebook has over the world of social media, one that has proven to be very tough to shake especially as far as its competitors are concerned.
The only real competitor that Facebook Inc. has comes from China, namely from Tencent Inc. which is the parent company of the popular messaging app WeChat. WeChat is basically the Chinese version of WhatsApp offered by Tencent Inc to Chinese people that are not able to use WhatsApp due to laws banning the service in the country. Tencent Inc is certainly no slouch, with WeChat boasting over 1.1 billion active users, and Tencent’s other properties such as QQ and Qzone having 823 million and 572 million active users respectively.
While these stats are quite robust and certainly respectable they still don’t come close to the numbers that Facebook enjoys which shows just how far behind any competition is. This obviously does not mean that Facebook is always going to be the dominant social media platform since things can often change far more quickly than you would initially realize but the fact of the matter is that over the past decade or so Facebook has continued to grow at a rapid pace.
Twitter was once a major competitor that Facebook had to reckon with, but now the number of active users that Twitter has does not compare at all to what Facebook has. Twitter has 330 million active users which isn’t bad at all but certainly not all that impressive when compared to Facebook’s billions. Twitter’s user count puts it on par with Reddit which is another major player in the world of social media albeit one that was never considered to be in the running to be the absolute biggest.
TikTok has made waves ever since its launch and has found an audience particularly in developing countries and the video sharing service now has over half a billion active users which might just end up giving Instagram a run for its money.
Chart courtesy of: Statista.
Read next: Users Are Wary of the Role Social Media Sites Play in Delivering the News
