Social media is everywhere. No matter where you are in the world, someone is tweeting, updating a Facebook status, or uploading photos to Instagram.
People are using social networking sites at work and at home, on desktop computers and mobile devices. With so many people using social media every day, it's no surprise that each network has several hundred million users and growing!
Facebook -- 200 million active users
Facebook is the most popular social media network, with over 200 million active users. It's also a great place to advertise your business. Facebook is a good place to start your social media marketing because it's simple to use, has lots of features, and allows you to reach a large audience quickly.
Twitter -- 150 million active users
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets". Tweets are publicly visible by default, but otherwise can be protected to make them private. Users can follow other users' tweets via the web and via third-party applications such as TweetDeck, an application built on top of Twitter's API; or integrate them into other websites with an API.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass while they were working together at Odeo (Odeo was later acquired by Google). The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity due to its public nature; anyone could read the updates posted on Twitter without needing an account or being logged in. However, this feature has led to privacy concerns as it meant people could find out personal information about others who might not want their lives broadcasted for all to see (for example celebrities)
Check out our blog on "Best Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses"
LinkedIn -- 70 million active users
LinkedIn is a business social network that can be used as a tool for your professional development. With over 70 million users, it's the world's largest professional network and offers many ways to connect with others, find job opportunities and make new business connections. You can use LinkedIn to:
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Find job opportunities
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Find business partners
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Explore the latest industry news
YouTube -- 800 million unique visitors per month
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005 and owned by Google since late 2006. The service allows users to upload, share, rate, and comment on videos.
YouTube has 800 million unique visitors per month as of August 2016. In 2012, it was estimated that every minute more than 23 hours of new videos were uploaded to YouTube—and more than 100 hours are being added every minute as of July 2016 (the most recent estimate).
There are so many networks and hundreds of millions of people using them
Social media is a great way to connect with people who share your interests. There are so many social networks and hundreds of millions of people using them. The most popular social networks are Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Social media is a great way to connect with people and build relationships. If you're not using it, you're missing out!