The Planet's 24 Largest Social Media Sites

The Planet's 24 Largest Social Media Sites, And Where Their Next Wave Of Growth Will Come From

Social media transcends geography, and the sheer scale and diversity of audiences on the sites makes them tremendously important.

It's no longer all about Facebook. Instead, users in some of the biggest countries are gravitating to regional sites. Others are heading en masse to U.S.-based networks, meaning that some of the largest social sites are global communities first and foremost.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we compare the world's largest social networks in two ways. First, we evaluate the biggest properties side-by-side in terms of total audience size. Then we analyze the markets where each has the most growth potential, and their demographics in terms of country-of-origin.

Here are 10 of the most surprising facts from our first annual global media census: 

•&νβσπ;Facebook still has the largest user population at 1.16 billion monthly active users. But it's seldom-discussed that YouTube is close behind with 1 billion MAUs.

•&νβσπ;China's giant social media network, Qzone, is running in third place at 712 million total users. It's twice as large as global social messaging app WhatsApp, and nearly three times as large as Twitter.

•&νβσπ;Three of the world's top 10 social properties are messaging platforms: WhatsApp, LINE, and WeChat.

•&νβσπ;IPO-bound Twitter is smaller than many of its less-known rivals, including Tumblr, WhatsApp, and LINE.

•&νβσπ;Eighty-six percent of Facebook's users are outside the United States.

•&νβσπ;Facebook has 95 million users in China (despite the fact that it's officially blocked), 68 million in India, 42 million in Brazil. Taking these population together, they're twice as large as Facebook's U.S. population of 100 million.

•&νβσπ;Nearly 25% of LinkedIn's users are in India. In fact, there are more Indians than Americans on LinkedIn and Google+.

•&νβσπ;Despite being blocked in China, the major social networks still have many millions of Chinese active users who use various stratagems to access these services. Google+ has 100 million users in China, Twitter has 80 million, and YouTube has 60 million.

•&νβσπ;LinkedIn, the only major social network that is not blocked in China, has over 20 million users in the country.

•&νβσπ;Asia-Pacific overall has more active social media users than any region, and Southeast Asian markets are off the charts when it comes to mobile social media usage. Eighty-two percent of Thai smartphone owners access social media daily on their phones.