Top 11 Facebook Competitors & Alternatives in 2024

The top Facebook competitors are Google, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Quora and others. Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world. It was founded in 2004 but opened to the public in 2006 where it has risen to become an unmatchable social networking tool. Facebook had 2.989 billion monthly active users in April 2023, making it the most active social media platform, which suggests why its monthly revenue continues to upsurge. It has continued to improve the features of the website by adding more and more user-friendly features that augur well with the needs of the users.

As of 2023 financial year, Facebook had generated approximately $31.999B in revenues mostly from advertising sales and had a total of 86,482 employees. As it continues to grow by incorporating various innovations to enhance its performance and usability, it is projected that its members will continue to grow and it will remain the social network platform to beat in the world. Here are however some of the top 11 Facebook competitors that can give it a run of its money in this industry;

Here are some Key facts about Facebook in 2023

• Daily User base – Facebook has a daily user base of 2.06 billion
• Monthly user base – The monthly user base of Facebook is 2.9 billion
• Fake users – 1.6 billion
• Most Facebook users – India has the most Facebook users in 2023
• Revenue per user – Facebook is expected to have $39.63 as revenue earned per user

How does Facebook Make money?

Facebook makes money through advertising. Facebook is a platform where users get together for engagement, discussions, community and many other things. Facebook serves ads to these users and earns money from the advertising brands and agencies.

Boosting posts and advertising your page is another way Facebook earns money. A simple example is Marketing91 Facebook page which has 32000 subscribers but when we share a post on our page, it reaches only 300-400 people. We have to boost the post to make it reach to more people.

Another method of making money is through the services it officers and the hardware focus the company is aiming for. Facebook has ventured into AR and VR and also offers E-commerce and shopping. Nonetheless, the revenue from other activities is far lower than the revenue from advertising.

Top 11 Facebook competitors

1. Google

• Product Type: Technology company.
• Industry: Internet.
• Founded: 1998.
• Founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
• Headquarters: Mountain View, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Sundar Pichai.
• Revenue: 74.3 billion U.S. dollars (second quarter of 2023)
• Number of employees: 190,234 (2022)
• Market cap: $1635.26B (August 23, 2023)

Google is a US-based global internet company that specializes in offering digital products and services including advertising, online search, software and cloud computing. It is arguably the leading multiplatform that receives the highest number of visitors. Given that it offers a variety of features, it makes it easy for the users to use it for different searching purposes.

It generates much of its revenue from advertising via Google sites and Google Network websites. As much as Facebook earns relatively more from advertising, Google remains the major competitor in advertising. It currently has more than 190,234 fulltime employees and 121,000 contractors and commands a search share of 91.88% of traffic in the world as of 2023.

Google’s net income for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $18.368B. Google’s gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B.

Facebook vs Google

Because of the war of advertisements and marketing spends, Google is one of the top Facebook competitors. Google’s adwords is one of the toughest adversaries Facebook faces. Facebook smartly started the Social media boost package for its pages which brings a lot of revenue to Facebook. Yet, Google being a search engine, major industrial and E-commerce spending happens on Google itself.

It has also diverted its services and products making it a possible for many users to find it an ideal platform for various internet services and digital products. It currently provides Android’s operating system, chrome browser, chromecast and Nexus among many others.

2. TikTok

• Product Type: Social media platform.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: 2016.
• Founders: Zhang Yiming and ByteDance.
• Headquarters: Beijing, China.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Shou Zi Chew.
• Revenue: $11 billion (2022)
• Number of employees: 7,000 (2023)
• Market cap: 66 billion U.S. dollars (2023)

TikTok is a competitor which came out of the blue and blew away the user base of both – Facebook and Instagram. TikTok was funny and it gave power in the hands of the users. People could make mini videos of themselves doing comic stuff or even interesting things. These were liked by their viewers a lot. Because of the attention that the user base received, a lot of TikTok videos began being made on a daily basis.

TikTok especially exploded in countries with larger populations where lakhs of TikTok videos were being made every day. However, TikTok’s growth was limited due to a lack of trust in the Chinese government which caused many governments to ban TikTok in their countries. Nonetheless, TikTok was definitely one social media platform that gave it tough to facebook.

TikTok has 3 billion downloads (including 672 million downloads in 2022 alone) and 50 million daily active users. TikTok is the #1 downloaded app in more than 40 countries, available in 150+ markets and 35+ languages. In 2022, TikTok was the second-most downloaded app globally. TikTok has 150 million monthly active users in the U.S. In the first quarter of 2023, TikTok generated almost 500 million U.S. dollars in revenues from users worldwide.

TikTok vs Facebook

In a way, TikTok was good for Facebook too. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has been clear in his business philosophy. You cannot afford Ego in 2023. As a business FB always tries to innovate new products. But when it can’t then it simply copies its competitor’s products and destroys them. This is what Facebook has done by launching Instagram Reels which is now competing with TikTok. TikTok definitely has the first-mover advantage but it has been banned in several countries. This is why, in the long run, it will be Facebook that will win against TikTok.

3. Twitter

• Product Type: Microblogging service.
• Industry: Social media.
• Founded: 2006.
• Founders: Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams.
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Elon Musk.
• Revenue: $3bn (£2.29bn) (2023)
• Number of employees: 2,300 (2023)
• Market cap: $41.09 Billion (August 2023)

Twitter is an internet social networking platform that allows users to send relatively short messages commonly known as tweets. It is also regarded as one of the leading social media websites with an estimated 450 million monthly  users as of the first quarter of 2023. When considering only social media, from day 1, Twitter is considered as one of the toughest Facebook competitors.

Twitter has a unique layout and uses retweets and trending news to attract social media users. Twitter generated global revenue of $3 billion. By January 2023, Twitter only had around 2,300 employees left, according to Musk, with only 550 working full-time. By April, there were less than 1,500 active employees left with 80% of Twitter’s work force gone in a year. Research shows that Twitter is increasingly becoming an ideal platform for transmitting messages in live events. However, it faces stiff competition from other emerging platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat which are also becoming popular among users, especially the millennials.

Facebook vs Twitter

Twitter and Facebook are different based on the tone of the users who are interacting on the platform. Twitter is known to be far more serious and media-oriented as compared to Facebook. Moreover, Twitter has a much better reach for its tweets as compared to Facebook, where the reach is slowly becoming limited especially for brands. Most of the user base of Twitter is busy discussing real-time events whereas Facebook is more busy discussing entertainment.

4. Snapchat

• Product Type: Instant messaging app.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: 2011.
• Founders: Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown.
• Headquarters: Santa Monica, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Evan Spiegel.
• Revenue: $1.068B (June 30, 2023)
• Number of employees: 5,288 (2022)
• Market cap: $15.01B (August 23, 2023)

Snapchat is a mobile app that allows users to send, receive and share photos and multimedia content. It was launched in 2011 with an initial intention to share impermanent pictures through a private message known as snaps that could only be viewed for a limited duration before they become inaccessible.

It supports video viewing and sharing which is also estimated to be more than 10 billion videos viewed and shared on this platform on a daily basis. This places it as one of the fastest rising Facebook competitors amongst all. When regular user’s video engagement is considered, Snapchat might be the number 1 in Facebook competition. It is one of the fastest growing social platforms recording global revenue of $404.48 million in 2016. As of the third quarter of 2017, Snapchat had 178 million daily active users, which is projected to increase given that it is also becoming more popular.

As of the second quarter of 2023, photo and video sharing app Snapchat had 397 million daily active users worldwide. Snapchat is ranked as the 2nd most popular social networking app in the US. Users created 5+ billion snaps every day. The largest Snapchat user base in the world was recorded in India as of April 2022, with an audience of 144.35 million users. 

5. LinkedIn

• Product Type: Professional networking service.
• Industry: Social media.
• Founded: 2003.
• Founders: Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Jean-Luc Vaillant, and Eric Ly.
• Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Ryan Roslansky.
• Revenue: $15 billion + (FY2023)
• Number of employees: more than 19,500
• Market cap: 29.99 B

LinkedIn is also a social networking service majorly for professionals and businesses. It currently has over 470 million active users from all over the world making it one of the most popular sites in the world. It supports 26 different languages and available in more than 200 countries. LinkedIn is very different from Facebook and while Facebook is more social, LinkedIn is more professional. Because it attracts most of the professional crowd, it is considered as one of the top Facebook Competitors.

Over 75 million business and 135,000 schools have LinkedIn accounts. There are more than 199 million members in the US alone.

LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft in December 2016 at figure estimated to be $26.2 billion. It generates a better percentage of its revenue from hiring solutions, then advertising followed by premium subscriptions. It is mostly used by persons between 25 to 34 years old who are positioning themselves in developing their careers and businesses.  If we consider all the players in Facebook Competition analysis, LinkedIn will be the most unfazed one because its value proposition is completely different.

6. Pinterest

• Product Type: Social media platform.
• Industry: Social media.
• Founded: 2010.
• Founders: Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp.
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Ben Silbermann.
• Revenue: $0.708B (June 30, 2023)
• Number of employees: 3,987 (2022)
• Market cap: $18.07B (August 22, 2023)

Pinterest is a social networking platform that is arguably regarded as the fastest growing site in history to ever reach 10 million new visitors in a month and attain high user engagement metrics. This was such a big deal considering that it was an invitation-based platform during its initial launch and growth.

Pinterest had 463 million monthly active users in April 2023 placing it 14th in our ranking of the world’s most ‘active’ social media platforms. The total number of people that use Pinterest each month increased by roughly 13 million (+2.9%) in the three months leading up to April 2023.The United States of America has at least 90.1 million active Pinterest users.

Pinterest net income for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $-0.035B. Pinterest gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $0.539B. Pinterest operating income for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $-0.073B.

7. Quora

• Product Type: Question-and-answer platform.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: 2009.
• Founders: Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever.
• Headquarters: Mountain View, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Jeff Weiner.

Quora is a US-based interactive website that offers a platform for question-answering mechanisms. The users ask questions, provide answers, edit and organize the information accordingly. It was established in 2009 but was launched to the public in 2010. Its headquarters is in California, but it is available in 5 languages, which include English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Quora has 300+ million monthly active users. 3000 to 5000 Questions are asked on Quora every day. The majority of Quora users are from India. The United States sends the most traffic to Quora.com. quora.com gets most of its social media traffic from Youtube. Quora users engage in discussions of 400,000 topics every day. Quora is valued at $2 billion US dollars as of 2023.

It is growing strongly and is considered one of the toughest Facebook Competitors in the future especially in most of the countries that are developing and that have a young and vibrant crowd with a lot of questions which need answers. Quora’s membership is free, and you can ask your questions or provide the answers anonymously, but one can as well choose to register. More importantly, Quora questions and answers can easily be searched via Google while Facebook is completely private. Thus, more and more people are joining Quora to have intelligent conversations.

8. Vkontakte

• Product Type: Social networking service.
• Industry: Internet.
• Founded: 2006.
• Founders: Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov.
• Headquarters: Saint Petersburg, Russia.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Pavel Durov.
• Revenue: 98 billion Russian rubles (2022)

Commonly known as VK, Vkontakte is a Russian-based social networking platform and is considered in Facebook Competition due to its Russian social media users. It is available in various languages but more common with the Russians. Its headquarters is in Moscow, Russia. It has more than 460 million active members. The figure shows that it is indeed a growing social media platform that is growing immensely worth watching out for.

It was recently ranked as the 8^th most popular social network. In consideration of the fact that its awareness is increasingly expanding to other parts of the world, it is projected that the membership of this particular platform will also increase significantly.

9. YouTube

• Product Type: Video-sharing platform.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: 2005.
• Founders: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.
• Headquarters: San Bruno, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Susan Wojcicki.

YouTube is a video sharing platform that allows users to view, upload, share and download a variety of user-generated media and corporate content.  It is the leading website with unique visitors every month. It was founded in 2005 but has gradually grown to become a force to reckon with in the social media industry. It rivals Facebook particularly on video content sharing and viewing aspect with more than 167.4 million users in every month as of 2016.

YouTube has over 2 billion monthly active users. In the U.S., 62% of users access YouTube daily. YouTube is the world’s second-most visited website. 694,000 hours of video are streamed on YouTube each minute. YouTube Shorts receive 15 billion daily views. YouTube ads have the potential to reach 2.56 billion users. YouTube is available in over 100 countries and 80 languages.

Advertisers could reach 2.527 billion users on YouTube in April 2023 placing it 2nd in our ranking of the world’s most ‘active’ social media platforms. YouTube has at least 2.527 billion users around the world in April 2023. India has 467.0 million active YouTube users. The United States of America has 246.0 million active YouTube users.

Most of its revenue is generated through on-site advertising. Youtube is owned by Google. Facebook Videos & Youtube videos, are always in competition. The day Facebook starts video monetization, that day Youtube will start facing big problems because a lot of the traffic. Hence, Youtube is considered as one of the top Facebook Competitors.

10. Microsoft

• Product Type: Technology company.
• Industry: Software.
• Founded: 1975.
• Founders: Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
• Headquarters: Redmond, Washington, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Satya Nadella.
• Revenue: $56.189B (June 30, 2023)
• Number of employees: 221,000 (2023)
• Market cap: $2395.8B (August 22, 2023)

Microsoft Corporation is an American technology company that specializes in offering a wide range of consumer and industrial software, hardware, and services. It was established in 1975, and it is currently regarded as one of the leading technology companies in the world.

Microsoft net income for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $20.081B. Microsoft gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $39.394B. Microsoft total assets for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 were $411.976B. Microsoft operating income for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $24.254B.

In the aspect of competition with Facebook, Microsoft obtains its larger share of revenue from searching advertising. It also acquired LinkedIn in 2016; this is after it had purchased Skype in 2011, which also increases its potency as one of the major Facebook competitors in this industry. Microsoft major revenue, however, comes from the sale of the operating system, gaming consoles, hardware and hosting services among others. Even when considering Gaming consoles, Microsoft’s Xbox will be a major competitor to Oculus rift which is being launched soon.

11. WeChat

• Product Type: Multi-purpose messaging app.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: 2011.
• Founders: Zhang Xiaolong and Allen Zhang.
• Headquarters: Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
• Area served: Worldwide
• Current CEO: Zhang Xiaolong.
• Revenue: 150 billion yuan mark (Q1, 2023)
• Number of employees: 108,436 (2022)
• Market cap: $386.36B (August 22, 2023)

Tencent is a Chinese-based technology company that offers internet products and services. One of its social media products is WeChat. Tencent was established in 1998 and has significantly grown to become a major technology company both in China, Asia, and other countries. Tencent launched WeChat in 2011 which allows for social networking, e-commerce, instant messaging and web portals among others making it a considerable Facebook competitor primarily in Greater China and Asia in general.

Tencent has employed over 108,436 employees to facilitate various products and services that they offer in the market and effectively counter the potency of its rivals in the industry. Tencent is a household name in the social networking industry and hence cannot be ignored by any serious competitor. Because Facebook is not allowed in China, Quite simply, Tencent’s WeChat becomes one of the Facebook competitors in China.

WeChat statistics for 2022 show that about 360 million users read Official Account articles. Additionally, 120 million post updates on Moments, while 500 million users take advantage of Mini Programs daily. 45 billion messages are sent daily by WeChat users. WeChat is the 5th most popular social media network in terms of monthly active users. The highest traffic for WeChat comes from China, with the US being second! WeChat Moments receive about 10 billion hits every 24 hours. The number of Tencent’s WeChat active accounts has been increasing steadily. As at the end of June 2023, the Chinese multi-functional social media platform had over 1.3 billion monthly active users.

With the above Facebook Competition analysis, we had a close look at some of the top Facebook Competitors. Can you think of any more competitors of Facebook?

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