10 social media sites that have taken the world by storm
In 2018, there is hardly any millennial left whose life has not been touched upon by the phenomenon known as social media. It’s everywhere, it plays an important role in not just building our social persona digitally but it has also changed the way businesses interact with their audiences and potential customers. Funny that social media has taken over the world almost only a decade ago, but it is hardly possible for us to think of a time without it.
A quick glance at the social media landscape
Now there are more than a million reasons why as an individual we use social media. Whether to connect with our friends, family or strangers, to find jobs, to date someone, marry someone or to promote a business or an idea, online existence really matters a lot. Interestingly, what else matters is the myriad of social media sites that are available to users globally without which our lives seem to be incomplete in many ways. So, here’s a list of such most popular social media sites that we’ve grown to love, sometimes hate but most importantly can’t do without.
There’s no denying that Facebook’s popularity has as a marketing channel and as a crowd-favorite has declined in recent times, but let’s not give up on it just yet. With its sheer strength of over 1.4 billion users and over 900 million daily active users, Facebook is definitely the mother of all social media sites. In terms of business, especially a smaller one, you simply cannot afford to not have a presence on Facebook.
Founded on March 21, 2006, Twitter is a powerhouse when it comes to monthly active users, exceeding more than 320 million mark. Its micro-blogging style-format of updating a user’s current status in 140 characters is I think the key contributor to its worldwide popularity. Used in more than 35 countries Twitter is perfect when it comes to business interactions, releasing latest news, raising queries, answering them and also running targeted ads for specific kind of audience.
Owned by Facebook, Instagram was launched on October 6, 2010, and today boasts of more than 400 million active users. From a photo-sharing app, it has transformed into one of the best platforms to share information about food, travel, art, culture and all kinds of experiences a millennial goes through.
Again, acquired by Facebook on February 19, 2004, WhatsApp is the most popular instant-messaging apps of our times with more than 1 billion users who send more than 60 million messages every day to communicate with friends, family and also for business prospects worldwide. Along with messages we also rely on it to send images, videos, audio files and even documents.
YouTube
There is just one name that comes to mind when we say the word video and that is YouTube, the tallest video-based media content website of all. It was started by three PayPal employees in February 2005 and later was bought by Google in November 2006. YouTube enjoys more than 1 billion website visitors per month. This only shows how widely YouTube content is consumed globally explaining why it’s the second-most used search engine behind Google.
Snapchat
It’s a place for all the young millennials to be. Released in September 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, Snapchat is a photo messaging and multimedia sharing app. The most unique part about this app that ‘snaps’ shared can only be viewed for a user-specific time length. Although its origin as a photo sharing app, videos have now become a dominant feature of Snapchat giving Facebook a run for their money with reportedly 166 million daily active users worldwide.
Largely meant for professional networking, LinkedIn popularity has only increased since its inception on May 5, 2003. LinkedIn enjoys a user base of more than 400 million registered users and is available in 24 languages all across the globe. Connecting with people with similar professional interests who hail from similar industries has been completely revamped and made easier with LinkedIn.
Sagoon
Sagoon is a social commerce app that was launched in July 2014. Based out of three countries, India, USA and Nepal, Sagoon now has a global reach 2.6 million concurrent users and 1.1 million downloads since it’s Android app launch in January 2018.The motto of this global social ecommerce site is Connect, Share and Earn. The multi-application platform offers products that allows users to build true connections, share useful experiences, and earn while socializing.
Pinterest is widely used as a virtual pinboard to save ideas and information as ‘pins’. It is not a social network in the traditional sense and has more than 200 million active users since it’s debut in 2010. For an average user at Pinterest is to collect what’s inspiring and helpful virtually instead of sharing the content they collect on the platform.