How many social media platforms are there?
The golden age of social media platforms may be over, but more services than ever are competing for our attention
It’s fair to say social media’s heyday is over.
The novelty of checking into a café on Facebook has worn off, breakfast selfies are a cliché, and sharing personal information extends an open invitation to cybercriminals and trolls.
The upcoming ban on access for under-16s may be poorly defined, but it shows the direction of travel away from endlessly surrendering personal data to profit-hungry American businesses.
There is growing awareness of the mental health problems social media has triggered, as well as the many unwholesome traits (trolling, ghosting, phishing) it facilitates.
It’s therefore ironic that an unprecedented number of social media services are competing for eyeballs, just as the tide of public and legal opinion begins to turn against them.
Compiling a definitive list of social media platforms is as hard as measuring coastlines, since definitions vary and it’s impossible to include every new service or country-specific app.
By the time you read this article, some of the sites mentioned may have been rebranded, amalgamated or closed down entirely.
The Sora 2 text-to-video AI service lasted just seven months before imploding due to huge operating costs, declining user numbers and the sheer implausibility of its output.
A few definitions
It’s debatable whether secure messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram qualify as social media, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll include them.
Social media platforms tend to cover half a dozen categories, with messaging services arguably the least social – a WhatsApp and a text message often achieve the same thing.
True social networking sites include legacy giants Facebook and LinkedIn, though the latter is arguably a jobs board as much as a conventional social media tool.
There are short-form video sites (TikTok and Snapchat), alongside longer-form rivals (YouTube, Vimeo) for people whose attention spans extend to minutes rather than seconds.
Microblogging remains popular and Threads is seeing rapid growth, even though market leader X continues to shed users while its ‘kinder’ BlueSky rival failed to take off.
Much of Threads’ success is due to heavy-rotation advertising on Instagram, which remains the leading photography site even as its algorithm serves up ever more ‘you might like’ mush.
Finally, community-based discussion boards include Mumsnet and Reddit alongside advice services such as Quora.
The numbers game
The most popular social media platforms include Facebook (user numbers), YouTube (viewing time) and WhatsApp (public perception).
While Threads and TikTok continue to grow, Instagram is losing a lot of users and Snapchat accounts are being closed more frequently than ever before as digital burnout accelerates.
It’s harder to get definitive information on country-specific services like Douyin (a sanitised Chinese-centric version of TikTok) or Weibo.
The likes of QQ and Kuaishou might not be widely recognised in the UK, but in fairness, Mumsnet won’t be widely recognised in China.
Most industry observers believe around a hundred major social media platforms currently operate, with a handful of corporate giants owning most of the leading services.
As well as Facebook, Meta owns WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Threads. Then there’s Google-owned YouTube, plus Microsoft-owned LinkedIn and Skype.
In China, Tencent owns QQ and WeChat, while ByteDance owns Douyin and TikTok.
New platforms may emerge in time, but the critical mass required to make a social media service successful naturally prohibits too many firms from entering this overcrowded market.
Even amid such unprecedented choice in social networks, our advice remains the same – unplug and unwind…
