Have We Hit Peak Social Media – September Update

You ready for the September update on social media usage? In July and August I expanded upon the work of expandedramblings.com (if you can please pardon the pun) to see how many users the top 25 social media sites have between them and September is no different.

I started keeping track of the top 25 social media sites in July so that, in time, a hopefully useful resource will be formed which may yield some insights into future social media trends.

My take on it is that I think the current iteration of social media is close to plateauing. Undoubtedly there are new social media sites forming on a near daily basis but the real question is will any of them ever grow to any significant size – will any of the current crop of social media platforms ever grow to be the same size as Facebook for example? I think not, and if so, in time we should see a plateauing of social media usage. In any event, I’ll keep track of the figures, knowledge is no burden and all that.

Have We Hit Peak Social Media – September Update

Anyway, without further ado, here are the top 25 social media sites for September.

No.#	Name	Users (in millions)	Comments
1	Facebook	1150	Surely you’ve heard of FB?
2	YouTube	1000	..ditto for YouTube
3	QQ	825.4	Chinese social media network
4	QZone	611	Chinese social media
5	Sina Weibo	503	Chinese social media site
6	Twitter	500	..tweet tweet..
7	Google +	343	Expect to see this figure much bigger next month
8	Tagged	330	probably should have heard of this one
9	LinkedIn	238	Social media network for business
10	WeChat/WeiXln	235	Originally Chinese, now global
11	Line	230	Japanese study social network
12	Tumblr	216	They see me tumblin’, they hatin’
13	Gree	190	Japanese social media, sushi pic heaven
14	Renren	178	Chinese real name social network
15	Badoo	172	Russian owned, dating social network
16	Instagram	150	No meal is complete without it
17	Youku Toudou	130	Chinese YouTube
18	VK.com	100	Russian social network site
19	Netlog	84	Founded in Belgium, now global social media network
20	MyHeritage	75	Family orientated social network
21	Pinterest	70	Pin the tail on the..
22	Odnoklassniki	65.3	Russian social network
23	MyLife	63	Social media site aggregator to find friends
24	Ask.fm	60	Social media site that’s always in the news
25	ClassMates	55	School based social network

Now, for those of you who weren’t born with Rainman like arithmetic skills, the social media user base for the top 25 sites for September is 7.594 BILLION which is 104 million less than in August, a -1.3695% change. In total there were 251 sites featured on the Expanded Ramblings page which combined had 18.393 BILLLION users. That’s a lot of users but it’s the first time in 3 months that there has been a dip in growth for the top 25 social media platforms.

Will it be higher or lower for October? Comment below and would love to hear your views on whether or not you think social media is near it’s peak?

Note: These social media usage figures are based on the work done by ExpandedRamblings. It isn’t easy to get accurate and verified stats and so some of the social media stats might be a bit off.