When people think of Facebook as a company, they mostly think of it synonymously with Facebook the social network. However, Facebook Inc. is much more than that, as today’s chart nicely illustrates. With WhatsApp, Instagram and of course the namesake Facebook and Messenger, the company owns four of the world’s largest social media / messaging services. Facebook alone is used by almost 2.5 billion people per month, while WhatsApp counts 2 billion monthly users and Messenger also has surpassed the billion user mark. According to company data aggregated by DataReportal, Tencent, the Chinese company behind WeChat, Qzone and messenger QQ also boasts almost 2.5 billion users in total, but it still doesn’t come close to matching Facebook’s global footprint.
What all of the services mentioned in the chart below have in common is their immense attractiveness to advertisers. Not only do they all boast hundreds of millions of users, but they also have the ability to target specific groups based on likes, dislikes and past behavior. That is why social media advertising has grown immensely over the past few years. Global social media ad revenue is expected to surpass $98 billion in 2020, according to the Statista Digital Market Outlook.
