Social Media Stocks: 5 Biggest Companies

MAUs: 8 billion

With its broad range of social media apps, it’s no surprise that Meta Platforms leads the pack on this top social media stocks list. Based in Menlo Park, California, the company controls four of the top-ranked social media platforms. In addition to Facebook (2.96 billion MAUs), Meta’s core social media products also include WhatsApp (2 billion MAUs), Instagram (2 billion MAUs) and Facebook Messenger (1.04 billion MAUs).

Following the late 2021 announcement that Facebook would be rebranding as Meta Platforms and investing tens of billions of dollars to become a market leader in the metaverse, many wondered about the company's new direction.

However, as Business Insider reported in April of this year, "According to a new report from the Information, Meta is no longer pitching the metaverse to advertisers in meetings. Instead, the company is incentivizing the use of its short-form video product Reels, while also highlighting its slew of AI tools, per the report."

MAUs: 2.53 billion

Next on this list of the top social media stocks is Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Google serves as a holding company for Alphabet's internet properties, including video streaming platform YouTube. While Google+, an attempt at a Facebook rival, never really took off, YouTube ranks as the second most popular social media app in terms of MAUs, and it is also the world’s largest video platform.

The website was founded in February 2005, and the world’s first YouTube video, which features co-founder Jawed Karim, was uploaded just two months later. YouTube quickly grew in popularity, and Alphabet, then Google, purchased the video streaming site for US$1.65 billion in late 2006. More than a decade and a half later, YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users who generate billions of views each day. About 70 percent of YouTube views happen on mobile devices.

In 2023's first quarter, YouTube made US$6.69 billion in advertising revenues, down 2.6 percent from the same period in the previous year, as advertisers pulled back on campaigns in light of economic uncertainty.

MAUs: 1.89 billion

Chinese multinational technology and entertainment company Tencent Holdings owns China’s largest messaging app, WeChat (1.31 billion MAUs), as well as the smaller but popular QQ (572 million MAUs), which is a messaging software service. Aside from that, the company publishes many of the world’s most popular video games and offers cloud-computing and fintech services.

WeChat and ByteDance's social media platform TikTok have come under scrutiny in recent years due to privacy and national security concerns. Since 2020, Tencent has reportedly spent US$6.3 million on lobbying the US federal government in response to former US President Donald Trump's attempt to ban WeChat.

Tencent Holdings is currently transforming its QQ chat app by embedding the video game engine Unreal Engine and launching a new feature called Super QQ Show, a 3D interactive space that allows users to connect socially, watch shows and play games.

MAUs: 750 million

Top social media stock Snap joined the stock market scene after its initial public offering in 2017. The company’s social media app Snapchat launched in 2011 and allows users to determine how long the messages and images they send are viewable by the recipient. While Snapchat is a highly popular app among Millennials and Gen Z consumers in the US, in recent years its Indian userbase has grown substantially, sitting at 182.35 million MAUs compared to the US' 108.8 million MAUs as of April 2023.

In early 2022, Snap announced the renewal and expansion of content deals with Disney (NYSE:DIS), ViacomCBS (NASDAQ:VIAC) and Comcast's (NASDAQ:CMCSA) NBCUniversal Media; the deals include short-form video offerings created for Snapchat’s Discover area. In early 2023, the company inked two new content partnership deals, one with the Women’s World Cup and the other with NBCUniversal for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

MAUs: 640 million

The last top social media stock on this list is Beijing-headquartered Kuaishou Technology, which went public in 2021. It operates the country’s second largest short video sharing app for mobile devices, Kuaishou.

In January 2022, Kuaishou signed a global licensing agreement with France-based Believe (EPA:BLV), which operates TuneCore, a DIY digital music distribution platform. Kuaishou previously inked a similar agreement in 2021 with the third largest recording company in the global music industry, Warner Music Group (NASDAQ:WMG).

In a March 2023 earnings call, Kuaishou CEO Cheng Yixiao emphasized the company's commitment to investing in emerging technologies, specifically generative AI.