Social Media Networking Sites You Need to Know About - part 2
Part Two of a Three Part Report
Social Media Networking Sites You Need to Know About
The top ten reasons for using social media sites:
- To stay in touch with what friends are doing (42%)
- To stay up-to-date with news and current events (41%)
- To fill up spare time (39%)
- To find funny or entertaining content (37%)
- General networking with other people (34%)
- Because friends are already on them (33%)
- To share photos or videos with others (32%)
- To share my opinion (30%)
- To research new products to buy (29%)
- To meet new people (27%)
Social media can share information, spread brand awareness and it can make or break your business. If you’re not utilising social media effectively, you’re missing out on a whole new potential market of consumers.
20 more Social Media sites reviewed in this Second Part of a Three Part Report.
21 - Kiwibox
This is a community-based social networking site, especially for those who live in New York.
It offers an online magazine to target teens through fashion tips, advice and chat.
It also allows young adults to let everyone know about their skills and interests.
Kiwibox has a number of unique features such as blogging, photos, status updates, games, forums, event pictures, event scheduling.
Kiwibox was initially founded in 1999 to give teenagers a voice on the internet and was a leader in the teen oriented world for several years.
It was founded by Lin Dai, Michael Howard, and Ivan Tumanov. Dai served as the Chief Executive Officer and Editor-in-Chief, Howard as the Chief Operation Officer, and Tumanov as the Chief Technology Officer and it is owned by Kiwibox.com Inc.
It is owned by Kiwibox.com Inc and was founded in 1999 to give teenagers a voice on the Internet and was a leader in the teen oriented world for several years.
Kiwibox reached 3 million users in 2015 and continues to grow with the new user-friendly app and website.
22 - LINE
LINE is a globally available messaging social network that enables you to share photos, videos, text messages and even audio messages or files.
LINE is the fast growing mobile messenger app, bringing users closer to their friends and loved ones. LINE is available on smartphones, including iPhones and Android devices, and also PCs and Macs.
LINE is an application that works on multiple platforms and has access via multiple personal computers (Windows or macOS).
The application will also give an option of address book syncing. This application also has a feature to add friends through the use of QR codes, by Line ID, and by shaking phones simultaneously.
The application has a direct pop-out message box for reading and replying to make it easy for users to communicate. It also can share photos, videos and music with other users, send the current or any specific location, voice audio, emojis, stickers and emoticons to friends.
Users can see a real-time confirmation when messages are sent and received or use a hidden chat feature, which can hide and delete a chat history (from both involved devices and Line servers) after a time set by the user.
The application also makes free voice and video calls. Users can also chat and share media in a group by creating and joining groups that have up to 500 people.
Chats also provide bulletin boards on which users can post, like, and comment. This application also has timeline and homepage features that allow users to post pictures, text and stickers on their homepages.
Users can also change their Line theme to the theme Line provides in the theme shop for free or users can buy other famous cartoon characters they like.
Line also has a feature, called a Snap movie, that users can use to record a stop-motion video and add in provided background music.
Number of active users per month: 215 million approximately.
23 - LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps.
Launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs.
LinkedIn is easily one of the most popular professional social networking sites or apps and is available in over 20 languages.
LinkedIn is a social network specifically designed for career and business professionals to connect and it is good for building connections for freelance work, a customer base, potential partners, or simply to keep your job prospects open.
It is used across the globe by all types of professionals and serves as an ideal platform to connect with different businesses, locate and hire ideal candidates, and more.
With more than 706 million members from more than 200 countries worldwide, including executives from every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network.
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has offices in more than 30 cities around the world and employs 16,000 people.
The firm, which is based in California, is used by employers to find suitable candidates for jobs and by employees to search for new jobs.
LinkedIn is to cut about 960 jobs worldwide after being hit by firms recruiting fewer staff amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The cuts will focus on the sales and hiring divisions, hitting 6% of the professional networking site's global workforce.
Number of active users per month is approximately 100 million.
24 - LiveJournal
This San Francisco-based social networking site is available in Russia, as Zhivoy Zhurnal or Zhe Zhe.
It enables users to maintain a diary, blog or journal, along with privacy controls.
LiveJournal stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian social networking site where users can keep a blog, journal or diary.
American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.
Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP Media in 2007; the service continued to operate out of the U.S. via a California-based subsidiary, LiveJournal, Inc., but began moving some operations to Russian offices in 2009.
In December 2016, the service relocated its servers to Russia, and in April 2017, LiveJournal changed its terms of service to conform to Russian Law.
As with other social networks, a wide variety of public figures use the service, as do political pundits, who use it for political commentary, particularly in Russia, where it partners with the online newspaper Gazeta.ru.
Each comment can be replied to individually, starting a new thread. All users, including non-paying users, can set various options for comments: they can instruct the software to only accept comments from those on their friends list or block anonymous comments (meaning only LiveJournal users can comment on their posts).
They can also screen various types of comments before they are displayed, or disable commenting entirely. Users can also have replies sent directly to their registered e-mail address.
In addition, LiveJournal acts as host to group journals, dubbed "communities". Anyone who joins a community can make posts to it as they would on a regular journal; communities also have "maintainers", ordinary users who run the community and oversee membership and moderation.
LiveJournal in the United States has had over 10 million monthly uniques, 30 million monthly visitors, and 170 million page views. As with most weblogs, people can comment on each other's journal entries and create a message board-style thread of comments.
25 - MeetMe
Formerly known as myYearbook, MeetMe is aimed at users who want to find new friends and chat with them.
This makes it highly popular among teens and young students.
MeetMe is a social discovery service that is committed to making meeting all types of people fun. Signing up is easy, filling out a profile is a speedy process, and interaction with other users is entertaining.
Whereas using more traditional dating sites can sometimes feel like a chore, using MeetMe feels like an amusing diversion. And best of all, most of the features are free.
MeetMe began its ascent from surprisingly humble origins. In 2005, a 15- and 16-year-old pair of siblings, Catherine and David Cook, got the idea to trade in the traditional paper yearbook for a 21st-century digital version. myYearbook was born.
It went on to hire over 100 employees, raise $17 million in funding, lay claim to over 20 million members and 1.2 billion monthly page views, and earn $20 million in revenue.
Now The Meet Group, Inc. (formerly MeetMe) owns several mobile social networking groups including MeetMe, hi5, LOVOO, Growlr, Skout, and Tagged.
The company has millions of mobile daily active users. Its mobile apps are available on iOS, and Android in multiple languages. Through these apps, users can stream live video, send gifts, chat, and share photos.
The Meet Group derives revenue from in-app purchases, subscriptions, and advertising. The company has offices in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dresden and Berlin
The Meet Group has transformed its business from being a predominantly advertising model to now generating the majority of revenue from user pay sources, which include subscriptions and in-app purchases for virtual gifts as part of its video live-streaming product.
The company also derives revenue from advertising. In the second quarter of 2018, 60% of revenue was derived from user-pay, versus 26% in the second quarter of 2017.
Live streaming video revenue has become an increasingly important component of revenue and growth, and the product has been rolled out to all of the Company's main apps.
26 - Meetup
This social networking portal enables you to find groups of like-minded people, who have similar interest to you, near your locality, anywhere in the world.
It also facilitates offline group meetings and you can become a part of such groups and their discussions.
It was founded in 2002 by Chairman Scott Heiferman and four co-founders. The company was acquired by WeWork in 2017 and remains headquartered in New York City.
WeWork sold it to AlleyCorp, an early stage NY-focused venture fund and incubator, in March 2020.
The early version of Meetup generated revenues by charging a fee to venues in exchange for bringing Meetup users to their business.
Once enough users added themselves to a group, Meetup would send the group members an email, asking them to vote on one of three sponsoring venues for the group to meet at. Within a few months of Meetup launching, 56,000 users had joined the site.
Meetup was originally intended to focus on hobbies and interests, but it was popularised by Presidential hopeful Howard Dean in 2004. Meetup developed paid services to help the Dean campaign to meet with Meetup users.
Dean also publicised Meetup groups of supporters in his speeches and on his website. At the peak of Dean's campaign, 143,000 users had joined Meetup groups for Dean supporters.
Afterwards, Meetup became a routine part of Internet campaigning for American politicians.
Meetup groups are run by approximately 140,000 organisers. Any Meetup user can be an organiser.
Organisers set up groups, organise events, and develop event content. They also pay a fee to run the group, under the expectation of sharing the cost with members that attend events.
Meetup has policies against organising meetups around a commercial interest, hate speech, or groups that do not meet in-person.
This policy, against organising meetups around commercial interests is not only not enforced; but, the Meetup company intentionally and deliberately ignore the policy and allow such to become Meetup groups.
About 28% of organisers have sponsors that provide venues, drinks, and event content.
27 - Mixi
This is a popular Japanese social networking service that has around 30 million active users per month.
It was founded in 1999 and is owned by Mixi, Inc.
The word Mixi is a combination of Mix and I, referring to the idea that the user, "I", "mixes" with other users through the service.
It enables you to connect with your friends and loved ones in a convenient way and even based on your areas of interest. The focus of Mixi is community entertainment, that is, meeting new people based on common interests.
Users can send and receive messages, write in a diary, read and comment on others' diaries, organize and join communities, and invite their friends.
Research indicates that some users, particularly young women, are more likely to use Mixi to connect in more private ways with close friends, particularly in contrast to perceptions of Facebook as a more public social network.
In 2004 the company released the social network Mixi, and in 2013 the smartphone app Monster Strike. Both have grown as communication services that offer close companions a place to have fun and get together.
Mixi has enjoyed a steady growth in its user base. In 2005, the website had more than one million users, and less than a year later, it had more than five million users.
The site had more than 10 million users in February 2007, and as of July 2010, more than 30 million.
Consolidated, full-time employees are 1037 as of March 31, 2020. It’s net sales are over $500million.
28 - MyHeritage
This is an online genealogy social platform which supports more than 42 languages and empowers its users to create family trees, upload and browse through family photos and manage their own family history.
It could also be used by people to find their ancestors and get more information about them.
MyHeritage is an online genealogy platform with web, mobile, and software products and has other acquisitions including the Dutch family network, Zooof; "Social Network For Families MyHeritage Furthers US Presence With Acquisition ...
Signing up to MyHeritage is completely free and allows you to build your own family site. Basic sites are free to create.
With your Basic family site, you can add up to 250 individuals in the family tree you build. If you add photos and scanned documents to the family site, the limit of storage space is 500 MB.
MyHeritage is the leading global discovery platform for exploring family history, uncovering ethnic origins, finding new relatives, and gaining valuable health insights. With sophisticated matching technologies and billions of international historical records,
MyHeritage empowers users to build their family trees and make exciting family connections.
This is an integrated service that combines family history and DNA testing for genealogy and health, MyHeritage is uniquely positioned to offer users a meaningful discovery experience that unites their past, present, and future.
The company was founded in 2003 by our CEO entrepreneur and family historian Gilad Japhet. From a humble garage startup, MyHeritage has grown into a global company with 104 million users around the world.
420 employees work out of bright, spacious offices in Israel, North America, and Europe.
Guided by core values of innovation, compassion, and diversity, the team undertakes many voluntary community initiatives, using our expertise and technology to reunite families.
29 - Myspace
This is a music-focused social networking site and provides an interactive and user-submitted network of friends. It also provides blogs, groups, personal profiles, pictures, videos and so on.
Social media’s rise began in the early 2000s. The millennial generation found purpose on the Internet by way of social networking websites. From 2005 to 2008, MySpace reigned supreme.
MySpace was the most visited social networking site in the world, even surpassing Google in June of 2006 as the most visited website in the United States. At its peak, News Corp purchased MySpace for $580 million. In 2007, MySpace was valued at $12 billion. By 2009, MySpace employed about 1,600 workers.
After the over half a billion-dollar purchase, MySpace’s new owners decided to focus on monetising the service immediately.
Under the guidance of a media empire that had little-to-no Internet company knowledge, MySpace began to flood their users with ads while doing very little to improve the user experience.
Though Facebook was already on the rise, the site was targeted strictly at college students, minimally diminishing MySpace’s popularity at the time.
It gets millions of visitors to its site each day and it is one of the most visited websites in the world. MySpace is a phenomenal and provides marketers another river to market their resources abundantly as it consists a large network of individuals.
A lot of people were marketing their services on MySpace and it ranged from: Singers, Actors, Models, Small business owners, Comedians and Filmmakers.
The main theme about MySpace is to add friends using various marketing techniques and that is displayed in your profile.
The reason why marketers want friends is so that they will have a range of people that they can market to; it is sort of like an email list in a sense.
You can also send a message to all your friends through the MySpace bulletin system which is one of the central marketing systems in MySpace.
MySpace was originally built for the younger audience but you can see that it’s obviously changing very quickly because a lot of the older audiences roam around there.
The concept with the “friends” theme is very similar to high-school so you have to step outside your normal business frame of mind and work on fitting in.
Number of active users: 20 million approximately
30 - Nextdoor
This is a private social networking platform for neighborhoods in the US. It’s kind of like a virtual town hall or coffee shop where people meet to gab about local topics.
Nextdoor launched in the United States in October 2011, and is currently available in 11 countries.
Users of Nextdoor are required to submit their real names and addresses (or street without the exact number) to the website; posts made to the website are available only on other Nextdoor members living in the same neighborhood.
The objective is pretty simple: allowing users to get connected with the people in their area.
Typical platform uses include neighbors reporting on news and events in their "neighborhood" and members asking each other for local service-provider recommendations.
The Nextdoor app is now used in more than 260,000 neighborhoods in 11 countries worldwide, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, France, and Australian.
Nextdoor has also introduced two new features, Help Maps and Groups, to give people a way to better support one another during the coronavirus outbreak.
The Help Map offers a way to coordinate aid between those in need, like the elderly and at-risk, and those willing to offer some form of assistance, like running errands or dropping off supplies, for example. Groups, meanwhile, allows smaller groups to network outside of the main feed.
In addition to everyday folk, thousands of public agency departments use the app. And businesses have earned upward of 40 million recommendations.
31 - Pinterest
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information on the World Wide Web using images and, on a smaller scale, GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards.
This photo sharing and visual bookmarking social media site or app enables you to find new ideas for your projects and save them.
So, you can do DIY tasks or home improvement projects, plan your travel agenda and so on by using Pinterest.
Pinterest is as safe to use as most other social media websites because users must sign in, and password protect their accounts.
It also does not require you to enter personal or financial information, so you have little to compromise by signing up.
Development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched the prototype.
Nine months after the launch the website had 10,000 users.
The site was created by ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan and had over 400 million monthly as of August 2020. It is operated by Pinterest, Inc., which is based in San Francisco.
32 - QQ
Tencent QQ, more popularly known as just QQ, is an instant messaging, chat-based, social media platform.
It became international, with more than 80 countries using it, after it was launched in China in February 1999 under the name of OICQ by Tencent which is a Chinese multinational holding company founded in 1998 that holds companies in IT related areas.
It can be used to stay in touch with friends through texts, video calls and voice chats. It even has a built-in translator to translate your chats.
Number of active users per month is around 900 million and has an "epidemic situation tracker" that reports real time data about coronavirus and deaths across China from over 170 sources, according to Tencent.
33 - Quora
Quora is a place where people can share and gain knowledge by asking and answering questions.
Users post questions on any topic and other users respond.
Quora is an American question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, followed, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions.
Its owner, Quora Inc., is based in Mountain View, California, United States.
Users can sign up using Facebook, Twitter, Google or email. As part of the registration process, they are asked to select five areas of interest to follow. Registered users can post or respond to questions, post reviews, or add a blog about a topic.
Quora also has social media features: users can up-vote (like) a question, follow people, comment and leave private messages for others. Spaces is a feature that lets people form communities around shared interests and tastes.
According to the Quora association, the number of daily questions asked varies, but it is almost always between 3,000–5,000 questions. A question will get five answers on average.
Quora says its mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. A vast amount of the knowledge that would be valuable to many people is currently only available to a few, either locked in people’s heads, or only accessible to select groups.
They say they want to connect the people who have knowledge to the people who need it, to bring together people with different perspectives so they can understand each other better, and to empower everyone to share their knowledge for the benefit of the rest of the world.
Quora is rated for teens ages 13 and older, and it can be safe for kids with adult supervision.
Parents may want to warn their children that upvotes do not necessarily imply that answers are accurate. Some answers are more popular or funnier than others, get more votes and are shown first, but they are not the most “correct” ones.
What makes Quora unique is not a not search or social media site. It's somewhere in-between, with over 300 million people coming every month to conduct research, evaluate products, ask for tips, and learn more about the world around them.
This knowledge exchange is conducive to people who are receptive to new ideas and looking to discover new products. This includes people looking for reliable information about your company, products, competitors, or industry as a whole.
Aside from a growing high-intent audience, Quora works to build a platform and ecosystem that is optimal for readers, writers, askers, and seekers of information.
Unlike other platforms where content gets buried or disappears, the knowledge shared on Quora is evergreen. This means your answers aren't just relevant for a day, they're still easy to find months and years later.
The company was founded in June 2009 by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever ex-Facebook employees, and the website was made available to the public for the first time on June 21, 2010.
34 - QZone
Like QQ and WeChat, QZone is another social networking service developed by Tencent. It enables you to share photos, watch videos, listen to songs, write blogs, maintain diaries and so on.
It also empowers you to choose the accessories and customise the look and feel of your QZone webpages.
QZone started in April 2005 as an interior service within the Tencent company. The name was originally "Little Home Zone" in Tencent company.
At the very beginning, the reference object of QZone is not a social network, but blog products.
You can access and share content on QZone in English with QQ International. Although the full version of QZone is available to Mandarin speakers only, international users who don't speak the language can still enjoy the main features of Tencent's popular social network, one of the world's largest.
Number of active users per month: 640 million approximately.
35 - Ravelry
Ravelry is a community-based social network that is targeted at people who are interested in fibre arts, such as spinning, knitting, weaving and crocheting.
People can share their own collections, different ideas and learn from the experiences of other members for better collaboration possibilities.
Spouses Cassidy and Jessica Forbes founded Ravelry in May 2007. Their idea was to create a web presence for all fiber artists.
Ravelry is a place for knitters, crocheters, designers, spinners, and dyers to keep track of their yarn, tools and pattern information, and look to others for ideas and inspiration
In addition to serving as an organisational tool and a social network, Ravelry facilitates micro-business, allowing designers to sell their knitting patterns and supporting informal, direct buying and selling between users via the "Stash" and "Needles & Hooks" capabilities.
"Yarnies" are semi-professional dyers, spinners, and/or painters who sell handspun, hand-dyed or painted yarns.
Yarnies exist in a separate category from users who are simply selling yarn they own but did not make themselves, and must create a special business-type profile on the site, "blur[ring] the lines between a commercial operation and a homemade undertaking."
Knitters may use Ravelry to fund-raise for charities, an example of "an activity that straddles the commercial and the non-commercial economies," and the site has been also used by some for market research.
Ravelry itself generates income to maintain the site through three main mechanisms.
First, advertisements for a range of fiber arts-related products from both large- and small-scale businesses are displayed throughout the site.
Second, the pattern store enables designers to sell PDF versions of their patterns; a small portion of the sales from the pattern stores goes to Ravelry, while 98.7% goes to the designers.
Third, the Ravelry Mini-Mart sells branded merchandise such as logo T-shirts, bags, and stickers.
For social networking, the site has forums, groups, and friend-related features that give people ways to interact with other knitters, crocheters, weavers and spinners.
Photos can be added to project and stash pages, and also to forum posts, by connecting to the user
Ravelry has about 8 million users and has become known as Facebook for knitters and in 2019 it banned support for Trump.
36 - Reddit
Reddit is an online forum featuring aggregated content, news, and conversations. The self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” Reddit allows users to post text, links, videos, images, or questions.
It’s kind of like a microcosm of every other social network all jammed together into one super-forum. With over 160 million unique monthly visitors, Reddit is the fifth most popular website in the United States and eighth across the globe.
Reddit is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Registered members submit content to the site such as links, text posts, and images, which are then voted up or down by other members.
Reddit is a social news website and forum where content is socially curated and promoted by site members through voting.
The site name is a play on the words "I read it." Reddit member registration is free, and it is required to use the website's basic features.
Reddit allows you to submit content and later vote for the content.
The voting determines whether the content moves up or down, which is ultimately organised based on the areas of interest (known as subreddits).
Reddit is a site made by and for adults, and as such, there's an incredible amount of inappropriate content.
While there is some moderation, the sheer volume of content means that almost anything can be found, including pornography, violent material, hate speech, and suicide tips.
Reddit is a combination of social media, news sites and message boards, creating a unique community which is driven by engaging content.
Some users say that it is one of the best places to get authentic product feedback as people are looking to engage in discussion and the anonymity guarantees genuine feedback.
There's another reason why Reddit is popular with the nerdy slice of the world's population as it is considered an incredible source of information on many fields of human knowledge.
You can browse through philosophy, languages, coding, molecular gastronomy or whatever makes your mind hungry.
Number of active users per month: 160 million approximately.
37 - Renren
This is the largest social networking site in China and is literally a platform for everyone.
It has been highly popular with the youth due to its similarity to Facebook, as it allows users to easily connect with others, quickly share thoughts and posts, and even update their moods.
Renren, which started as Xiaonei.com, was founded by a group of students, including Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen and Lai Binqiang at Tsinghua University and Tianjin University in December 2005.
Joseph Chen, who had himself tried to launch a student community website called ChinaRen as early as 1999 and sold it in 2000, acquired Xiaonei through his new company Oak Pacific in October 2006.
Born in 1970 in China, Chen moved with his family to the US where he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later earned an MBA from Stanford University. He remains the chairman and CEO.
Renren has a privacy policy to preserve personal information. Different privacy levels for profile, contact info and blogs can be modified in the privacy settings, thus others that fail to match the privacy requirements cannot browse the specific information or contents of a given user.
There are some common kinds of expressions on Renren, such as renewing the mood (lit. updating personal state), blogging, voting and sharing others’ blogs.
In addition, users upload photos and share photos, articles and external links (usually videos). Leaving a message or commenting on photos, blogs, status, etc. is quite commonly seen; the interacting users leaving and replying to messages is considered a prominent instance of basic communication on Renren.
Activities can be held online by calling on friends to participate. There are also several peripheral applications, such as online mini games, regular games, doggies, testing, parking lot, and selling and buying of friends.
However, Renren's censorship is fairly strict, especially to sensitive keywords in the blogs, compared with other SNS websites in China. Blog entries containing keywords like Tiananmen Square Massacre, Falun Gong and Zhao Ziyang cannot be released.
Others that are suspected to be related to political topics, obscenity or thrillers are manually censored by administrators, delaying or blocking their release.
Number of active users per month is more than 31 million and it has over 150 million registered users.
38 - ReverbNation
ReverbNation.com is a web site, launched in 2006, that focuses on the independent music industry.
It aims to provide a central site for musicians, producers, and venues to collaborate and communicate.
This is a social networking platform for musicians and professionals to connect with others in the music industry.
It offers different tools to musicians to manage their careers and offers them the right access to their music industry partners and fans.
You get to keep 100% of your rights and royalties. Distribute your music on all major digital platforms through ReverbNation, including Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, and more.
A feature called Band Equity measures popularity based on four metrics of its service: reach, influence, access, and recency with the top 100 of each genre being recognised.
With over a decade of experience and with new innovations in technology and music, they have advanced their system to create a platform where musicians can find resources and excel.
ReverbNation has an audience of over 3 million people including artists, fans, and venues.
ReverbNation has a consumer rating of 1.74 stars from 119 reviews. This unfortunately indicates that most consumers are not completely satisfied by the services. However, their experience is not negative and if you are into music it is worth trying the site for yourself.
ReverbNation has over 4 million emerging musicians and is the global leader in empowering independent Artists to advance their careers.
Since its founding in 2006, ReverbNation has remained committed to putting Artists First through exposure to the music industry, connection to a worldwide audience, and access to powerful promotional tools.
39 - Sina Weibo
This is a highly popular micro-blogging social platform in China that is known for its hybrid mix of Twitter’s and Facebook’s features.
There are now more people using Sina Weibo, the Chinese micro-blogging platform, than there are using Twitter.
In Sina Weibo, most trends are created due to retweets of media content such as jokes, images and videos, whereas on Twitter, the trends tend to have more to do with current global events and news stories.
According to the Chinese company's first quarter results, it has 340 million active monthly users, 30% up on the previous year.
About 154 million people use the site daily, 91% of whom access it via mobile.
By comparison, Twitter, which is blocked in China, has around 328 million active monthly users.
Sina Weibo is the most popular of China's micro-blogging services, and it is the preferred platform for most mainland Chinese newspapers and TV stations, which have millions of followers.
Number of active users per month: 340 million approximately.
40 - Skype
Skype, owned by Microsoft, is one of the most popular communication-based social networking platforms.
Skype is a telecommunications application that specialises in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smartwatches over the Internet. Skype also provides instant messaging services.
Users may transmit text, video, audio and images.
It allows you to connect with people through voice calls, video calls (using a webcam) and text messaging.
You can even conduct group conference calls.
And, the best part is that Skype-to-Skype calls are free and can be used to communicate with anyone, located in any part of the world, over the internet.
Number of active Skype users per month is around 300 million.
There is also Skype for Business which was launched in 2015 is enterprise instant messaging software developed by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Office suite. It is designed for use with the on-premises Skype for Business Server software, and a software as a service version offered as part of Office 365.
Then in September 2017, Microsoft announced that it would phase out Skype for Business in favor of Microsoft Teams, a new cloud-based collaboration platform.
Support for Skype for Business Online will end in July 2021, and Skype for Business Server 2019 will receive extended support through October 14, 2025.
