This month’s Verto Index looks at the most popular social media apps, websites, and services, from Facebook to Tumblr, based on monthly unique users (among U.S. adults, ages 18 and above). Following their protocol, Verto Index has also included messaging apps, which play a key role in this sector, often blurring the line between communications tool and social network. Please note that data provided in this report was revised and updated on November 21.
The Top 10 Social Media Apps and Social Networks
Once again, Facebook dominates the Verto Index for social media properties (across both apps and sites), which is no surprise: it owns three of the top four social media properties on Verto Index.
Facebook’s flagship property far outranks any other property in the list of the top ten social media properties in nearly every metric, with nearly 200 million monthly unique users who spend an average of almost 18.5 hours per month using Facebook. That’s more than quadruple the amount of time spent on any other social media property on our Verto Index. Here are some other highlights:
- The second-ranking property is Facebook-owned Instagram, which claims 144 million monthly users who spend just two hours per month on the property.
- Despite a troubled year for Twitter, it’s still the third-most popular social media property, with 111 million users who spend just over three hours per month on their Twitter timelines.
- Snapchat, even with its flashy IPO earlier this year, still lags at position number nine in our rankings, with 44 million monthly users who spend four hours per month on the ephemeral video chat platform.
But according to Verto Analytics’ data, with the exception of Facebook, these major social media players aren’t the social networks where consumers are spending the most time. Instead, dating properties such as Grindr and POF (Plenty of Fish), as well as niche social media properties like Kik and Discord (a network for gamers), garner the largest amount of time from their users on a monthly basis. Following in Facebook’s footsteps, Grindr users spent 14.5 hours per month using the platform, while Kik users spent more than 8 hours on the relatively small social network.
The Five Stickiest Social Media Properties
Stickiness is how Verto identifies which properties are most engaging, by comparing daily users to monthly users. Their latest look at the stickiest properties on their Index shows that, unsurprisingly, Facebook is the most engaging social media property, with a rating of 70%. This still places the company well above some of its biggest rivals: Snapchat has just a 47% stickiness and Twitter ranks at just 27%.
Are Dating Networks the New Social Networks?
As seen in the chart above, dating apps and websites have emerged as some of the stickiest properties on our Index, with relatively large amounts of time spent per user and number of monthly sessions per user. Besides Grindr, which has a stickiness score that outranks Twitter and Snapchat, dating properties like Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid attract more monthly user time than bigger properties like Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and even Reddit.
And while dating apps and sites form a niche group within the great social media landscape (and have comparatively tiny monthly user numbers when compared to the likes of Facebook or Twitter), it’s not surprising to see several dating properties expand into more fully-fledged social media (or even career networking) platforms: Bumble recently launched both Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz, while Tinder Social has experimented with group dates and social activity matchmaking. If these properties manage to successfully pivot towards or create new social media and networking apps or sites altogether, they could offer a more engaging (and in some cases, hyper-targeted) alternative to Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire.
