Before launching into your social media marketing plan for your ecommerce business, you need to first get an overview of the distribution of social media usage. Given the growing penetration and usage of social media these days, you should start your marketing efforts by focusing on the platforms where you can find most of your target audience. To do that, you need to find out which social media platform has the largest user base.

The latest statistics show that Facebook continues to reign strong as the king of social media, with 2.80 billion active users as of January 2021. That means that nearly two out of every three of the 4.2 billion active social media users are active Facebook users. 

Facebook’s statistics and its social media ranking say it all. Not only is it the social media platform with the most active users, but it is also the platform on which users spend the most time with an average of 58 minutes per day, compared to some of the other most popular social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter.

Second on the list of the most popular social media platforms in 2020 is YouTube with 2.3 billion active users – 84 percent of the number of Facebook users. 

Given that 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day worldwide, it may seem like an uphill task to get your video noticed. But also consider these YouTube statistics: 1 billion hours of video on YouTube are watched daily and 90 percent of consumers say they discover new brands and products through YouTube. 

The third- and fourth-most popular social media platforms are WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, with two billion and 1.3 billion active users respectively. Unlike Facebook and YouTube, they are classified as a platform for messaging, chat, and/or calls.

Further down the list are Instagram and WeChat, China’s version of WhatsApp, both of which have just over 1.2 billion active users. Despite being relatively high on the list of the most popular social media platforms, their combined number of active users is still lower than that of Facebook’s.

These statistics paint a clear picture of Facebook’s dominant social media ranking. Of the six most popular social media platforms, more than half are Facebook entities—namely Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram.

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