#1’s of social media

by Donart Hasani · 18/01/2021

With records breaking every year, social media has never been bigger. From the most followed account on Instagram to the most viewed video on YouTube, numbers are being crushed! But who or what are those #1’s of social media at the moment?

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Twitter

Twitter saw the light of day in 2006, so it has been hanging around here for a while. The most followed Twitter account is the 44th president of the United States of America, Barack Obama. The President has, as of January 2021, 128 million followers. Far ahead from the second most followed account on Twitter, Justin Bieber. The pop idol currently has 114 million followers. The tweet that got the most likes is a Tweet posted on Chadwick Bosman’s Twitter page by his family confirming his death.

Instagram

At the end of 2020, Instagram was officially 10 years old. In the meantime there are 854.5 million users on Instagram. The account with the largest amount of followers is, funnily enough, the account of Instagram itself, with 380 million followers. But the most followed person on Instagram is Cristiano Ronaldo with almost 244 million followers. He has a lead of 36 million followers on Ariana Grande, who has 208 million followers.

The most liked picture on Instagram is…. A picture of an egg. Really. In 2019, the account @world_record_egg posted a picture of an egg with the goal of surpassing the most-liked Instagram picture, which was Kylie Jenner's daughter with 18.6 million likes. As of today, the picture has 54.9 million likes.

TikTok

TikTok is one of the newest social media platforms, but the numbers are insane. The app was originally launched only in China in 2016 but was launched in 2017 for every iOS and Android user. In 2018 the app became popular after merging with Musical.ly.

Even though TikTok comes from China, the top 11 users on the app are all American users. With the number one followed user being Charli D’Amelio. Charli is in the lead with 105 million followers. With 8.2 billion likes, she happens to be the account with the most likes on all of her videos as well. That is billion with a B. People have liked her video’s 8200000000 times. Let that sink in.

YouTube

YouTube is the oldest platform on this list. Being launched in 2005, the platform is now 16 years old, which means YouTube can drive in America and drink beer in Belgium!

Users can’t “follow” people on YouTube, instead you subscribe to them. The most subscribed user on YouTube was for a long time Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, better known as Pewdiepie. But in April 2019, the channel T-Series, an Indian music video publisher, surpassed Felix. T-Series now holds the record of most subscribed channel on YouTube with 166 million subscribers. Followed by Felix, with 108 million subscribers.

In 2012 the most viewed video and the first video to ever hit 1 billion views was Gangnam Style by Psy. 9 years later the video has almost 4 billion views. Today the most viewed video is Baby Shark Dance video with 7.65 billion views.

The most liked video is Despacito with 42.19 million likes. The title that nobody wants, the most disliked video on YouTube, is ironically for YouTube itself. Their yearly tradition of making a YouTube Rewind video is rarely well received. But in 2018 they broke records with 18.8 million dislikes.

What records do you think will be broken in 2021? Will Charli still be the number one TikTok user? Or do you think a new social media platform will take over everything and break new records?