Social Media Platforms are a medium where you can reach a larger audience. The main aim of these platforms is to deliver, but you can also get feedback, start a discussion, or share. Most of these social media platforms allow you to choose your audiences.
Now, to some people, the term “media” can be very broad. Some people might include everything from a Grande Vegas casino login to Twitter under the title of a “socail media” platform. At the end of the day, both are online sites where you interact with other people. However, here we will focus on more classical social media platforms, where the focus is interaction such as speaking or video and picture sharing.
You can either go public or private at your discretion. It is called “Social” because it is a great way to communicate with friends and family and to keep updated with the rest of the world.
Social media platforms have great advantages. It allows people to be social under constricted circumstances. On these platforms, people can express themselves anonymously and without any pressure. There are a lot of benefits of social media platforms. You can post your opinions, your likes, and dislikes.
Many people have made a career out of writing blogs for these platforms. You can promote business using these platforms. Raising awareness and funds for causes you can relate to is much easier. You can now find people that your interests from around the world.
There are drawbacks as well. With these platforms, age-inappropriate things are accessible as well. But it boils down to the fact of how you use a certain commodity, and that is what defines the advantages and disadvantages. Below, we will discuss the current top 10 Social Media Platforms. Some you will be familiar with, and others you might want to explore.
Facebook is the largest social media platform. It supports approximately 2.9 billion MAUs (monthly active users), which make up around 37% of the world’s total population. Facebook has always claimed that its primary aim is to connect people. And it has successfully achieved its aim. Facebook is the most popular medium for online marketing. It allows free sign-up; with these free logins, you can socialize and share pictures, music, videos, and messages.
You can even blog your thoughts and opinions. With the paid accounts come more functionalities. It is the best way to support organizations, thoughts, and beliefs. You can create communities of like thoughts and views. Most famous websites have integrated with Facebook, and almost all small and big businesses have a page on Facebook. There are over 200 million small businesses on Facebook and more than seven million advertisers.
If we look at MAUs, then Instagram is at number 3 with around 2 billion MAUs. It can be defined as a visual platform from where you can share videos, stories, reels, live videos (IGTC for longer videos), and pictures.
It allows you to have both public as well as private audiences. You can share your life with millions of people simultaneously by sharing videos and visual clips. If your business requires a visual representation, then Instagram is your best choice. Facebook acquired it in 2012, which is why you can easily exchange between the two.
Pinterest is a search engine designed to be used as a social media platform. You can share what you have and search for more simultaneously. It was initiated as a place to find recipes, home, style, inspiration, and more.
You create “Pins” when you share your ideas, hence the name “Pinterest.” The main aim of this social media platform is to share ideas. It allows complete communication among everyone. You can use the pins as a bookmark. These pins can lead you to the original website, where you can find products that might interest you.
Quora
Quora is a Q/A-based open community where you can interact and query people for their opinions and views. It has 300 million MAUs, and an active platform for discussions. It does not support visuals, but many businesses link their page to Quora and assign employee advocates to promote their business via questions.
However, the main aim of this platform is to provide or get answers according to your interests. The answers are crowd-sourced information, but the validity of these answers is not guaranteed, of course.
Reddit is an up-growing social media platform that houses more than 430 million MAUs. The basic aim of this platform is to introduce people from different backgrounds sharing the same hobbies and interests. It is an amalgamation of different communities. All communities are based on different passions that interest people.
These communities are called subreddits which are further divided into more groups. It is known as a social website for news and events, but it allows you to share different views and opinions. You can share visuals as well but in a limited capacity. It is a social sharing website built around users submitting texts, links, and pictures.
TikTok
TikTok has rapidly gained popularity because it allows users to share short videos on any topic. It houses a community of a whopping 1 billion MAUs. Anyone can share their videos and earn popularity as well as money.
The main purpose of Tik Tok is to create, share and discover videos on their topic of interest. Youngsters widely use it to express themselves through what they are the best at. The users can share these videos across several communities. You will easily find a video on any topic, or you can find a challenge as well.
Twitter is a limited social media platform that allows users to express themselves with a limited word count. It houses around 436 million MAUs and is popular amongst mature people. It is mostly used to discuss real-time events or things happening on the go. It is also widely used as a customer service request channel. Most businesses have a link to Twitter on their pages.
The main purpose of this website is to allow people to share their views and opinions on a current affairs topic. The tweets generally contain text, but they can also contain links, photos, and videos.
This is one of the most popular social media platforms and is widely used for communication. WhatsApp is said to have reduced distances by allowing users to communicate actively.
It is used in over 180 countries and has over 2 billion MAUs, making it the third most popular social media platform. It is a chat app that allows users to exchange text messages, videos, and pictures. The users can even do live video chats.
WeChat is the Chinese alternative to WhatsApp and supports all communication functionalities like sharing of photographs and videos text messaging, video conferencing, video games, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, and location sharing. It has 1.26 billion MAUs. It was launched as a simple messaging app but quickly evolved into an all-in-one app.
YouTube
YouTube is easily the second-largest social media platform, supporting 2.2 billion MAUs. There are billions of videos shared by different users. It is also used as a search engine because there is a video demonstration for everything on YouTube.
People use YouTube to gain popularity and earn money because ether more your video trends on the internet, YouTube offers earnings to the YouTuber!
Conclusion
This is a world of social media where you can find everybody posting their statuses, pictures and videos. Some of them use the platforms to be aware of what’s happening around the society. All in all, social media platforms have revolutionized the world to the next level.