Facebook may be the butt of cliché jokes as a place for someone’s uncle to share their political takes and family photos, but it remains the dominant social media platform. And while TikTok is the cool kid with lots of young adopters, it still has only half the user base of its less-cool rival.
The social network led by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has 2.11 billion monthly active users globally, per new data shared by Sensor Tower. The data, covering the state of social media as the midpoint of 2025 approaches, looks at the platforms that have become household names in recent years, as well as how newcomers like Letterboxd and Lemon8 are performing; more on those in a moment.
By contrast, TikTok has 1.16 billion active users, according to Sensor Tower.
Beyond Facebook, Meta also has bragging rights as the parent company of the second largest app on the planet as well, with Instagram topping 1.5 billion monthly users by the end of May.
Meta’s Q1 2025 earnings reported aggregate metrics, covering Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
Facebook and Instagram’s combined dominance in the online ad market drove Meta to $42.3 billion in first quarter sales — up 35% earlier from a year prior — and has helped the company fund other ventures, like its artificial intelligence division, which is still losing billions of dollars each quarter.
According to data from Statista, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook have grown 5.5% and 4.3% respectively, year-over-year since February 2024. TikTok has grown by 2% — at a lesser rate than its competitors. Of the major platforms, LinkedIn had the most substantial year-over-year growth rising 17.1% since last February. X, however, has seen a decline in monthly active users of 5.3% in the past year as competing apps try to steal business from Elon Musk to become the new social media town square.
Data from Sensor Tower reflected that Facebook has somewhat plateaued with 0.33% year-over-year growth, while Instagram and TikTok grew at 4.42% and 4.68% respectively.
Meta’s social media dominance faces its stiffest competition from TikTok. ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of the popular app, has been reticent to share its global user count, but Sensor Tower data shows TikTok has hit 1.16 billion monthly active users.
ByteDance has been more forthcoming with its performance in the U.S., reporting that TikTok has 170 million monthly users as it argues for the app to remain in the States. The platform has been in a perpetual state of limbo since mid-January, when the app was set to be banned unless ByteDance divested from its American business.
That has not happened yet, and President Trump has signaled he will grant the app yet another 75-day extension to reach a deal. The chief concern U.S. lawmakers had with the app is that it could double as a spyware tool for China’s communist government, as Chinese law requires ByteDance to share information with authorities if they are asked to do so.
According to data from DemandSage, TikTok has held steady during this uncertain period, growing about 2% from 1.56 billion MAUs in Q1 of 2024 to 1.59 billion in Q1 of 2025. The app saw a sharp increase of 33% in MAUs in 2023, according to DemandSage, rising from 1.05 billion to 1.56 billion in just one year.
Natalie Park, a lifestyle influencer with more than 125,000 followers across social platforms, told TheWrap her content did not take off until she started leaning into what TikTok was organically pushing. After posting since the pandemic, the creator has seen a strong uptick in performance and retention by honing her own niche and curating a dedicated fan base.
“They’re just really good at adjusting and figuring out how to keep people hooked,” she said, comparing the short form video app to addictive games like Candy Crush. “The algorithm learns you so well that it knows exactly what you want to see and what content will click in your brain. That’s why they’ve been able to keep such a high retention and growth.”
There are a few other interesting points to consider when looking at the social media heavyweights:
- Snapchat has a formidable user base, with 900 million people using the app to send pictures, videos and messages each month; but the app, led by CEO Evan Spiegel, has struggled to monetize its audience since going public in 2017. Snap Inc.’s stock is down 40% in the last year, and Guggenheim analyst Michael Morris gave the company a neutral rating in a note to clients last week. He said he expects healthy growth in the second quarter, but the “majority of growth” will come from outside the U.S., where it has a harder time with ad sales.
- Musk versus Zuckerberg: Threads, an X rival that is an offshoot of Instagram, has surpassed Elon Musk’s social media platform in terms of monthly users, according to Sensor Tower. Threads has 338 million global users — 44 million more than the platform Musk bought in 2022. In terms of breaking news, X still looks to be the place to go to, as the traffic surge tied to last week’s Musk-Trump feud indicates.
- Sales per user: There is a clear separation in how much Meta makes per user when compared to the other publicly traded platforms. Meta — which said earlier this year 3.98 billion people use at least one of its apps between Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp each day — made $10.63 per user in the first quarter. The other platforms are still working to get close to that level. Snap Inc. reported $1.36 billion in first quarter revenue, which translates to $1.51 per Snapchat user; Pinterest’s first quarter sales of $855 million was equal to $1.91 per user; and Reddit, which made its Wall Street debut last year, reported $392.4 million in revenue between January and March — which comes out to about $5 per user.
On this front, TikTok is the wild card. ByteDance does not report its quarterly sales, but Bloomberg reported last month the company projects the app will generate $186 billion in revenue this year.
That would come out to $46.5 billion per quarter on average in 2025 — and would indicate TikTok is on pace to match or even surpass Meta’s annual sales. It would also translate to about $40 per TikTok user in sales, which would easily lap the field. That projection could not be independently verified by TheWrap.
New kids on the block
While platforms like Meta and TikTok have captivated a large portion of the global audience, there is still room in the marketplace for newer platforms.
TikTok’s sister app Lemon8 has quickly gained traction after launching in February 2023, growing from 8.6 million MAUs in Q4 of 2024 to 11 million as of May 2025. The Pinterest-meets-short-form-video social network focuses on lifestyle content, but some users said that the app felt redundant with content originally posted on the other ByteDance platform. However, if the TikTok ban goes into effect, ByteDance may rely on this backup plan more than they anticipated.
Another rising platform is Jay Graber’s Bluesky. Since Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter, his renamed platform X has lost a fifth of its monthly active users, dropping from 368 million in 2022 to 294 million halfway through 2025. Though Threads got a boost from being in the Meta family (gaining over 30 million users in its first 24 hours), Bluesky has become a new haven for online political conversation. But despite a surge after Trump’s election, Bluesky is still dwarfed by X and Threads – with only 11 million users.
Truth Social, the app launched by President Trump in 2022 as an alternative to Twitter, remains a sub scale niche platform. The app just enjoyed its best traffic day ever last week, amid the digital war of words between Musk and the president, but its user base remains tiny in comparison to X and similar platforms — just 780,000 users by the end of May, according to Sensor Tower data, which reflects a 95% increase in users year-over-year. The app is not generating much money, at least for now; Trump Media & Technology Group, the app’s parent company, reported a meager $821,000 in first quarter sales.
Other apps like Letterboxd, VSCO and Beli rely on their niches to build a dedicated audience. The app for film lovers, Letterboxd, has made a name for itself by leveraging its Top 4 feature on every profile, where users share their four favorite films. A daily diary allows cinephiles to log and rate each movie they watch, and for other users to comment on those reviews.
The app has gained a substantial following in the entertainment industry. Today’s top talent sees the three-circle logo on the red carpet and knows exactly what question they will be asked. And the app has its own social media following, with over 3 million followers across platforms.
Beli has similarly leaned into its niche of foodies. The app has a small but mighty following among Gen Z users, eating their way through their respective cities.
“I don’t care if it’s an influencer or a stranger’s,” 23-year-old Beli user Maggie Torstrick told TheWrap. “I’m equally likely to listen to their review. There’s no popularity.”
Park says the key to this platform’s success is its organic cross-promotion on competing social media platforms.
“Their app is all about ranking. They rank restaurants, like the best pasta spot, the best ramen spot, within their TikToks,” she explained. “They don’t really talk about the app itself and what it does on their social media. They just focus on restaurant recommendations.”
As mainstream social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok reward specialization from creators and capitalize on niche markets, there’s more room for apps that capture a narrower audience.
