The Fastest Growing Social Media Platforms in 2020

Posted by: Adam Post in LinkedIn, Social Media Apps, TikTok 0

Social media has been around for what seems like awhile, however many new social networks continuously show up, while old ones continue to die out. For the unlucky networks in the past that have lived as short of a life as a couple years, we are sorry you did not get to see the vast shift to digital networking. For the newer networks that have truly been able to thrive, keep doing what you’re doing. While we see social media networks come and go, it is important not only for marketers, but for investors, shareholders, business owners, operations managers, and many more people to know exactly what the fastest growing social media platforms are.

TikTok

As Facebook continues to sit on the throne year after year as the largest social media network, this does not mean that it is necessarily the fastest growing network. In September of 2016, an app called musical.ly was created in China. The app was shortly bought out by its parent company, ByteDance and renamed the infamous TikTok. It was then available to download outside of the Chinese market through the app store for iOS and Android users. TikTok instantly became a phenomenon. Within the short time we have had TikTok available in the App Store, it has been downloaded over 1.5 billion times. The app currently has more active users than LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat. TikTok impressively boasts the highest engagement rates across all social networks.

As of March 2020, TikTok is the most downloaded app. Although Facebook is still the true giant, and TikTok’s number of total monthly users do not compare, TikTok has a much higher growth rate through its few years it has been around. The number of American users has grown 5 times in the last 18 months, currently sitting at 1.43 million users. Although TikTok’s target audience has been people of the millennial and gen Z era, in less than 18 months, the number of US adult TikTok users grew 5.5 times. While the app is still competing with the big players: YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, the app has put up a good fight in growing at drastic rates, which is why it is one of the fastest growing social media platforms.

LinkedIn is another platform that has extremely high growth rates. The professional networking site was founded in 2003. In 2016, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. Before the acquisition, LinkedIn had been trending down. LinkedIn drives the most traffic to B2B blogs and websites. 90% of the social traffic is driven by three big networks: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, with more than half of it coming from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is growing faster than previously expected, with the number of users increasing 8.8% since 2019. The site is also projected to grow 6.2% this year to 62.1 million users, and 68.8 million users by 2022. Financially, LinkedIn is growing exponentially as well. LinkedIn’s Q3 2019 revenue has increased by 27%.

Instagram

In October of 2010, the visual sharing app, Instagram, was founded. Over the last few years, Instagram has evolved from a simple photo-sharing app into a powerful marketing tool. It is considered one of the fastest growing social media platforms with one of the most engaging user based platforms. Instagram is growing nearly 5% from quarter to quarter. Since most people are visual learners, Instagram has gained a lot of popularity over its years, which is why the vast majority of businesses market to their target audience on Instagram, interact with potential buyers, and acquire new customers. Instagram’s high growth rate could be due to new features they are consistently keeping up with.

There are many elements that trigger a network to die out and a new one to evolve into the next phenomenon. It is important to know how the social media world fluctuates, because it is inevitably implemented into our future. For some networks, they are expanding faster than others for reasons beyond what we expected. One thing is for sure, social media will continue to grow and be an influential part of marketing throughout the world.

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