List of social media sites by number of users

This list of social media sites ranks every platform that reports at least 500 million users, with the source and date for each figure. Seven platforms report a billion or more. ProfileTree, a Belfast digital marketing agency, has added UK and Irish usage data and a practical method for choosing the two or three sites worth your time.

The full list of social media sites by users

The table below covers every platform above the half-billion line, using the most recent figure each company or measurement source has published. Read the metric column before comparing any two rows, because the platforms do not all count the same thing.

LinkedIn sits seventh in the table even though its headline number is higher than WeChat’s, because a count of registered members cannot be ranked against a count of active users. The other rows follow the size of the figure each source reports.

For a business in the UK or Ireland, the useful question is which of these platforms your own customers open each week. That is the starting point for the social media marketing Belfast team at ProfileTree, and the rest of this guide follows the same order: the figures first, then what they mean for a shortlist.

How to read the figures

Most rankings of the biggest platforms disagree with each other, and the reason is the metric column. A monthly active user figure is a company’s own count of the people who used its app in a month. Advertising reach is the audience a platform’s ad tools say an advertiser can buy, which can rise or fall when a platform cleans up its accounts without any change in how many people use it.

DataReportal, which publishes the most widely quoted global figures, warns in its October 2026 update that Meta has recently removed a large number of accounts from its advertising audiences. That is why Facebook’s advertising reach of 2.32 billion sits so far below its last published active user count. Treat any list that mixes the two kinds of figures without labelling them as unreliable.

Why LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest and Snapchat need a note

LinkedIn is the platform most often misreported. Its 1.55 billion figure counts every registered member, and LinkedIn has not published an active user number for years, so the real audience in any month is much smaller. Use the headline figure as a ceiling on who you could reach, and judge the platform by the response your own posts get.

Reddit and Pinterest both publish their own audience numbers every quarter. Reddit’s third quarter 2026 results, released on 29 October 2026, showed 130.3 million daily active unique visitors and 515.2 million weekly, up 12 per cent and 16 per cent on a year-over-year basis. Pinterest reported a record 661 million monthly active users in the same quarter, up 10 per cent.

Snapchat ranks higher on this list than its share of marketing conversation would suggest. Snap’s second quarter 2026 results gave 493 million daily active users and 971 million monthly active users, and its third quarter figures are due in early November 2026.

Smaller social media sites worth knowing

Size is only one reason a platform earns a place on a shortlist, and several sites below the half-billion mark matter a great deal to particular businesses. Discord began as a gaming chat service and now hosts communities for hobbies, software products and paid memberships, which suits brands whose customers prefer a private room to a public feed. Twitch carries live video and is strongest in gaming and music, though some trades use it for long product demonstrations.

Quora rewards a business that answers questions in a narrow field well, because good answers keep appearing in search results for years. Spotify and SoundCloud distribute audio and podcasts, so they suit a firm with something to say at length. Bluesky and Mastodon draw journalists, academics and technology workers, which makes them worth watching for firms selling to those groups and of little use to most local firms.

In Asia, LINE leads messaging in Japan and KakaoTalk does the same in South Korea. China runs on its own apps, with Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), Kuaishou and Weibo alongside WeChat, and none of them works the way Western feeds do. If you sell into those markets, these apps matter far more than any platform in the table above.

Recent changes that affect the list

Four changes since the start of 2026 alter how the table should be read. The first concerns TikTok in the United States, where the app’s US operations moved into a new joint venture in January 2026, with ByteDance keeping a minority stake of 19.9 per cent. TikTok’s ownership outside the United States did not change, so for businesses in the UK and Ireland the app works as it did before.

The second is the contest between Threads and X. Meta said Threads passed 500 million monthly active users in June 2026, and on its earnings call of 21 October 2026 Mark Zuckerberg said Threads had overtaken X on monthly users, though Meta published no new number. X has not published an active user count, and the most recent figure, about 550 million users in March 2026, comes from a SpaceX filing that does not define what a user is.

The third is advertising reach. YouTube now leads every platform on reach at 2.77 billion, with TikTok at 2.33 billion and Facebook at 2.32 billion, so which platform counts as the biggest depends on the measure you pick. The fourth follows from it: Meta’s removal of accounts from its ad audiences has cut the reach its tools report for several apps, while the survey and app-usage data DataReportal publishes alongside it still show large audiences on those apps. Reported reach and real use can move separately, and a plan should rest on real use.

How many people use social media in the UK and Ireland

Social media use in the UK and Ireland is close to universal among adults online, so the decision for a business is never whether its customers use social media but which apps they open. The national figures below come from Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, and from DataReportal for Ireland.

Global totals and what they count

DataReportal counted 5.81 billion social media user identities at the start of October 2026, an increase of 151 million over twelve months, or annual growth of 2.7 per cent. That means close to seven in ten people on Earth, and 94.5 per cent of internet users, use social media each month.

DataReportal uses the word identities on purpose. One person can hold accounts on several platforms, and some accounts belong to businesses or are duplicates, so the total describes accounts in use and not unique people. Use it as background, and plan from the national figures that describe your own market.

UK use by platform

Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report, published on 10 December 2025 and based on data from May 2025, found YouTube used by 94 per cent of UK adults online, who watched for 51 minutes a day on average outside the television set. Facebook and Messenger together reached 93 per cent of online adults. WhatsApp reached 90 per cent, up from 87 per cent a year earlier, and 74 per cent of adults online used it every day.

Facebook Messenger reached 58 per cent of online adults after its user numbers fell by 7 per cent, and daily use dropped from 30 per cent to 23 per cent. TikTok reached 56 per cent, and adults aged 18 to 34 spent an average of 49 minutes a day on it. For a UK business, those figures put WhatsApp and YouTube ahead of the platforms that dominate most marketing conversations.

How people use the apps is changing as well. Ofcom’s Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes report for 2026 found that 89 per cent of adult internet users use at least one social media platform, rising to 97 per cent of those aged 16 to 34. Only 49 per cent of adult social media users now post, share or comment, down from 61 per cent in 2024, which means more of your audience watches and messages privately without ever reacting in public.

Social media use in Ireland

DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report for Ireland recorded 4.26 million social media user identities in October 2025, equal to 80.1 per cent of the population. The same report counted 5.26 million internet users, an online penetration of 98.9 per cent. Businesses in Northern Ireland that sell across the border are dealing with two markets where most adults use social media, and ProfileTree’s own guide to social media statistics for UK and Irish SMEs breaks the figures down further.

Types of social media sites and what each is for

It is quicker to think about platforms by category than by brand name, because the category tells you what the platform is for and what kind of content it needs. Most businesses need one platform from one or two of the groups below, and very few need something from every group.

Social and professional networks

Facebook and LinkedIn anchor this group. Facebook now earns its place for most local firms through Groups, Marketplace and Events, which still put a business in front of customers in a particular town, while the main feed now shows business posts to a small share of followers.

LinkedIn matters most to business-to-business firms, consultants and recruiters, because it is where decision-makers read about their own industries. A company page with the right industry, a clear description and regular posts from named staff usually outperforms a page that only shares links.

Video and short-form apps

Video takes most of the time people spend on social media, so this group matters even to firms that think of themselves as text-first. YouTube covers long-form video and works as a search engine, while TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts compete for short clips.

Short clips are cheap to test and hard to fake, and audiences notice quickly when a business copies a format without understanding it. The firms that do well here plan a month of short videos around questions customers actually ask, filmed by someone comfortable on camera.

Messaging and community platforms

WhatsApp handles direct contact between a business and its customers, and with about three-quarters of UK internet users opening it daily, it is the app your customers are most likely to have open. WhatsApp Business adds a product catalogue, automatic replies and a click-to-chat button for a website, which suits service firms that take enquiries by message.

Reddit, Quora and Discord organise people around shared interests and punish anything that reads like an advert. A business does well on Reddit only when its staff takes part in relevant communities as people with useful knowledge.

Visual discovery and audio platforms

Pinterest and the search features inside Instagram behave more like search engines than feeds, because people use them to plan purchases. Pinterest users save ideas for later, so the platform suits home, food, fashion and wedding businesses whose customers plan ahead.

Audio platforms work differently. A podcast on Spotify suits a business owner with expertise to share over half an hour, and it gives a sales team something to send to a prospect before a meeting.

Regional platforms

WeChat, QQ, Douyin, LINE and KakaoTalk dominate their home markets and barely register in the UK and Ireland. They matter only to a business that sells into China, Japan or South Korea, and in that case they matter more than any platform covered elsewhere in this guide.

How to choose social media sites for your business

Choose the two or three platforms where your customers already spend time and where your team can post well every week. The size of a platform tells you little about whether your customers are on it, and a smaller app that fits your audience will produce more enquiries than a larger one that does not.

Match platforms to the age of your buyers

Age divides platform use more sharply than anything else. Ofcom’s data shows adults aged 18 to 34 spending close to fifty minutes daily on TikTok, and a business selling to retirees and one selling to students should not be running the same plan. Guessing the age of your buyers is the most common early mistake, and the guide to how Gen Z uses social media sets out the figures for younger customers.

Business buyers and consumers use different platforms

Selling to other businesses is a slower job than selling to shoppers, and the platforms reflect that. Business buyers form opinions on LinkedIn and in industry groups over months, while a consumer can buy after one short video.

The rhythm of your posting should follow the buying cycle. A business-to-business firm needs steady, useful posts that build familiarity, and a retailer needs frequent, visual content timed to seasons and offers. ProfileTree’s article on choosing a platform for your business works through the decision by sector.

Run fewer platforms well

Two platforms run properly will produce more than five run in spare minutes, because each platform needs regular posting, replies to comments and messages, and a monthly review. An abandoned profile does more harm than having no profile, since customers who find it assume the business has closed or stopped caring.

“Northern Ireland businesses sell to customers who use very different apps, and most of their social media plans try to talk to all of them at once. Deciding which customer the plan is for is half the job, and it is the first question ProfileTree asks about any social media marketing brief in Belfast,” says Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree.

ProfileTree is a Belfast web design and digital marketing agency, founded in 2011 and based at the McSweeney Centre. Its social media work is organic only, so every recommendation in this guide assumes you are building an audience through your own posts and conversations, with no paid advertising.

Measuring whether a platform is worth keeping

Judge each platform by the enquiries, bookings or sales it produces, and review it every quarter. Views are the weakest signal a platform gives you, while saves, shares, profile visits, link clicks and messages show far more about whether people intend to act.

Pick two or three numbers that connect to revenue, such as enquiries from a tracked link or bookings that mention a post, and record them monthly. Daily figures swing too much to act on, and reacting to them leads to constant changes of plan.

Reuse your best work across the platforms you keep. A filmed interview can become a long YouTube video, several short clips and a written post, each pointing back to the same page on your website. Social posts and search work together when they are planned together, because profiles, videos, and articles all appear in the searches people run about your business on Google and inside the apps.

Use each quarterly review to drop a platform as well as add one. If a channel has produced no enquiries after two quarters of consistent posting, moving that time to a platform that works is a sound business decision. Teams that want to run this review themselves can book social media training for your team.

Getting help with organic social media

The next step is to check your own figures against this list: which platforms send people to your website, where your enquiries come from and how old your buyers are. If you want that review done for you, along with a posting plan for the platforms that fit, ProfileTree provides organic social media management for businesses across Northern Ireland, Ireland and Great Britain, built around the platforms your customers already use.

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