The graph shows the number of active users that login at a platform at least once a month. It clearly shows that Facebook is still the most dominant social network with over 1.28 billion monthly active users, followed by the 1 billion YouTube users and Tencent’s Instant Messenger service QQ (848 mil) and the social platform QZone (644 mil).

Although these stats provide some great insights in the status of the most popular platforms in the first quarter of this year, it’s even more interesting to know the changes in active usage. 

GlobalWebIndex (GWI) reports in their Q1 research the following growth-insights:

• Facebook’s members continue to grow, but active usage has seen a small decline. According to GWI 48% of the online population outside of China say that they actively use or contribute to the site each month. Although Facebook decreased in usage by 6% over the last six months (many large platforms as Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube have also seen small decreases) it still puts it ahead of all other platforms. Facebook’s growth decline is to be expected given how long Facebook has now been around. Facebook is now a “mainstream” platform. As a result it’s no longer “cool” for the younger generation that say goodbye to Facebook and use messenger apps instead.
• Instagram is the fastest rising social platform overall, while Tumblr and Pinterest also recorded rises. GWI notices that it’s on the newer more niche or seemingly “cooler” platforms where the largest growth in active usage is occurring.
• Qzone, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo are dominating the Chinese market, all of which have membership levels of 75%+. According to GWI Social Network, 51.com recorded the biggest growth in active usage with Youku, Qzone and Tudou rising too.

Of course, the necessity and decision to use social platform for Employer Branding and Recruitment varies per industry, target audience and region. Some forward thinking employers already make use of new and rapidly growing platforms as Instagram and WeChat to recruit. But from our experiences, we noticed that it's still the platforms Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube that dominate in western markets. In China for example it’s the popular micro blogging service Sina Weibo that is mostly used for recruiting.

The new, shiny and trendy

Platforms that see the biggest growth at this moment are mobile-only services, designed and initially released purely for use on smartphones. These services are particularly popular amongst younger audiences (13-25). Most talked about apps in 2014 are the fastest globally growing mobile photo and video app Instagram and the messenger apps WhatsApp, WeChat and Snapchat.

Instagram, the social networking smartphone app that enables users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr is very popular at the moment with more than 200 million monthly global users capturing and sharing their lives. There are several companies that use Instagram to recruit, such as SAP, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Microsoft and Marriott.

WhatsApp lets users send and receive text, image and video messages via a free Internet connection, which could otherwise be chargeable by a telecom provider. Its communication is one-to-one and there is no “follower” type option, which allows others to view content not directly intended for them. As of April 2014, WhatsApp has 500 million active users sharing 700 million photos and 100 million videos every single day. The fastest growing markets are Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia. There aren’t any good case studies available or companies using WhatsApp to recruit. This is probably due to the limited options for public communication.

WeChat is also a messenger app, but it’s characteristics differ from WhatsApp because it supports social networking via shared streaming content feeds and location–based social plug-ins to chat with and connect with local and international WeChat users. WeChat’s 400 million users are mainly based in the Chinese region, but is expanding rapidly overseas. There are quite a number of employers in China that use WeChat to recruit such as, Procter & Gamble (PG_recruiting), IBM (Ibmjob), Toshiba (Toshibajob) and Google (Googlejob).

Snapchat is a photo messaging app that lets users take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. The sent photos and videos are known as “Snaps”. Users set a time limit for the availability of each post they make (as of April 2014, the range is from 1 to 10 seconds). Expired posts are deleted from Snapchat’s servers. User stats are very hard to come by since the company doesn’t release any official numbers but they’re estimated to have about 30 million monthly active users. More and more consumer brands are experimenting with Snapchat such as, McDonalds. There aren’t many case examples of companies using Snapchat to recruit except for DDB Oslo and some U.S. Universities.

Interested to know more trends and stats on how employers use major social media platforms for employer branding and recruitment? Have a look at Maximum’s Social Recruitment Monitor for weekly insights and a performance benchmark.