Facebook Rules Social Media Kingdom, But Elon Musk Has A Tweet Up His Sleeve

In a world where Facebook-parent Meta Platforms Inc. META reigns supreme with three out of the top five social media platforms in terms of monthly users, curiosity arose when Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, reacted to these stats. 

What Happened: The Twitter account World of Statistics recently released a compilation of the “most popular” social media platforms based on their monthly active users, where Facebook claimed the top spot with a staggering 2.99 billion users, closely followed by YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok, owned by ByteDance, rounding up the top five contenders on the list.

See Also: Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Social Media Feeds Are Now Fueled By AI-Generated Content

Interestingly, Musk’s Twitter was not even in the top 10 but at number 16 with 450 million monthly active users. 

The tech billionaire responded to these numbers saying when evaluating social media platforms based on total user hours per month, the microblogging site would emerge as a significantly higher-ranking contender. 

Later, Similarweb Ltd. SMWB, a digital intelligence company, also took to Twitter and shared a list of top-performing social media platforms in terms of traffic to their website over the last three months. 

YouTube claimed the top spot with a remarkable 32.33 billion visits, followed by Facebook with 16.87 billion. Twitter secured the third position with 6.353 billion visits, followed by Instagram at 6.185 billion. 

Netizens were quick to notice that while in terms of monthly active users, Twitter might not rank in the top 10, the microblogging site has a much higher position when it comes to traffic. 

Why It’s Important: For the unversed, Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta plans to launch a decentralized text-based social media platform to rival Musk’s Twitter. The upcoming platform was reportedly codenamed “P92,” which now goes by the name “Barcelona.” 

Previously, it was also reported that since Musk became the owner of Twitter, fewer users are actively engaging with his posts on the platform. The tech billionaire also reportedly fired a Twitter engineer because he wasn’t happy about the impressions on his own tweets.

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