The social media landscape continues to expand at a record pace, with an estimated 5.44 billion users projected by the end of 2025.
What began as a handful of niche networking sites (including now-defunct MySpace) has become a near-universal mode of communication, with platforms now connecting people across every continent and demographic.
Meta remains the undisputed market leader. Its flagship site, Facebook, was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and today counts more than three billion monthly active users. Meta’s family of products—Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram—each exceed one billion users, and together reached about four billion monthly active users in the third quarter of 2023.
Since launching the Suzanne Downing (@AlaskaStory) page on Facebook in mid-September, the page has received more than 3.1 million views, showing the dominance of Facebook in the social media landscape.
Here is a chart showing the performance of the top social media sites in 2024:
While the United States has produced most of the world’s largest social networks, China has built powerful rivals that dominate its domestic market. Apps such as WeChat, QQ, and Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) command hundreds of millions of active users, thanks to their integration with local culture, e-commerce, and entertainment ecosystems. Douyin’s success even inspired the launch of the international sensation TikTok, which now rivals Western platforms in global reach.
