The Most Popular Social Apps In 2023
It’s easy to assume that a social app is popular because it has a big buzz, but that’s not always the case. If you’d ask the average person what they thought the most popular social network is, they’d probably say TikTok. That’s far from reality though, as TikTok lags way behind the leader, which is one that we’ve all been told is losing its appeal. Social Media Today dug into the real numbers when it comes to social apps, and this is what they found.
Social strength and popularity is measured by Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and Daily Active Users (DAUs). If you have a lot of users that use your app monthly or daily, you have a popular app.
As you can see from the chart above, Facebook is still the king of the hill, and by a lot. Facebook has 3.03b users, followed by YouTube (2.5b), Instagram (2b), and WhatsApp (2b). TikTok (1.5b) has half as many monthly users, although it’s still growing. Messenger comes next at (1.3b), followed by Snapchat (750m), X (formerly Twitter) (550m), Pinterest (465m), and Reddit (83.8m est.).
When it comes to daily active users, not all of the platforms provide the numbers, but it’s suspected to be pretty much the same as the MAU chart.
You’ll notice that LinkedIn isn’t included in the list. That’s because the service only provides member numbers, which doesn’t really tell you much except if the platform is growing or not. For the record, the company states that it has about 950 million members, but many of the gurus of social analytics dispute this number.
This social media landscape really hasn’t changed all that much of the last few years except all the social apps user counts got larger. Everyone wants to write off Facebook, but more and more people continue to use it. The same with YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp.
It looked like Threads was going to take off when it was launched earlier this year, but it turns out it was pushed out too soon and its lack of features turned people off. It did prove that even though we still use the same powerhouse social apps every month or every day, we still have an appetite for more.
