Top 20 New Social Media Networks (Sept 2023)
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In modern society, it’s virtually impossible that someone hasn’t heard of social networking giants like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
What you may not have heard about, however, are the dozens of new social networks geared toward serving niche markets.
From pregnant mothers to African American professionals and more, here are 20 of the hottest social networks for 2023.
1. Threads
5-Year Search Growth: 280%
Search Growth Status: Exploding
Year Founded: 2023
Location: Los Angeles, California
Users: 120M
Summary: Threads launched in mid-2023 offering competition to Twitter (now X). The social media platform owned and operated by Meta Platforms rapidly gained users and is marketed as Instagram's text-based conversation app.
Selena Gomez is currently the most-followed user on Threads.
2. Partiful
5-Year Search Growth: 4,700%
Search Growth Status: Exploding
Year Founded: Jan 2020
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Users: Unknown
Summary: Partiful is a social party planning platform designed to facilitate event organizing. The platform allows users to effortlessly create party pages for various social events.
Google searches for Partiful have taken off since the start of 2022 and the company has been backed by $20M of funding.
3. Quest
5-Year Search Growth: 385%
Search Growth Status: Exploding
Year Founded: 2005
Location: Bangalore, India
Users: Unknown
Summary: Since the 2020 pandemic, employers have found it increasingly difficult to find employees with the skillsets they require to operate in the modern economy. At the same time, baby boomers and members of Gen Z feel the skills they’ve developed over their lifetime are becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s job market. Enter Quest App.
Founded by Quest Alliance, a youth empowerment-focused non-profit, Quest App is a digital learning platform that aims to provide users with “employability skills” for the 21st century. More importantly, they provide support from a large community of learners and trainers. With 11.5 million job openings in the US alone - a record high - it's easy to see how both employers and prospective employees could benefit from the Quest App.
4. WeAre8
5-Year Search Growth: 2,600%
Search Growth Status: Peaked
Founded: 2012
Location: New York, NY
Users: Unknown
Summary: WeAre8 is billed as a transformative social media platform in which users are presented with 8 minutes of handpicked content each day. In addition, users are rewarded with small payments whenever advertising is viewed via the app. The company describes itself as "social media with purpose".
The growing social media network currently has close to 10,000 Twitter followers. And according to Crunchbase, has received $16.9 million in funding.
5. Lemon8
5-Year Search Growth: 2,500%
Search Growth Status: Peaked
Year Founded: Apr 2020
Location: Enschede, the Netherlands
Users: 5M+
Summary: TikTok's parent company ByteDance has begun promoting its photo-sharing social media project in the US. Already popular in Japan and Thailand, Lemon8 has seen a surge in Google searches since the start of 2022.
The app has been gaining traction in the US market, recently rising to the top of the App Store charts for lifestyle apps. While on the Google Play Store, Lemon8 has already been downloaded over 5 million times.
6. Made With Friends
5-Year Search Growth: 88%
Search Growth Status: Exploding
Founded: 2015
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Users: 250k+
Summary: Made With Friends subverts the traditional social media blueprint, instead asking users' friends to post to their profile pages. TTYL has previous when it comes to this concept, initially implementing it with its Poparazzi app.
The Made With Friends TikTok account has enjoyed reasonable early success, accumulating over 60,000 followers and almost half a million likes.
7. Supernova
5-Year Search Growth: 243%
Search Growth Status: Exploding
Founded: Oct 7, 2012
Location: London, UK
Users: Undisclosed
Summary: Over the last decade, both social entrepreneurship and environmentally conscious entrepreneurship have emerged as highly popular trends. At the same time, millennials are utilizing social media and crowd-funding sites to support causes they believe in ways unseen in prior generations.
To take advantage of these trends, Supernova positions itself as the social network that gives back. In particular, they claim to share 60% of all ad revenue with charities of the users’ choosing. In March of 2022, for example, they funneled their income toward Ukraine.
8. Tagged
5-Year Search Growth: 111%
Search Growth Status: Exploding
Year Founded: 2004
Location: San Francisco, CA
Users: 300M+
Summary: As anyone in the industry knows, the dating app market is ferociously competitive. While first-to-market movers like Tinder have managed to pass the test of time, the app store is littered with hundreds of failed dating apps.
With that said, African-American-focused Tagged seems to have caught on (for the time being at least). Branded as the place where “you can be yourself” because “you’re already lit fam,” Tagged combines the swiping feature seen on many dating apps with the ability to initiate live video calls with matches.
On the one hand, the site claims to have 300 million+ users. On the other, iTunes App Store reviews reveal many of those accounts may be fake.
9. BAND
5-Year Search Growth: 70%
Search Growth Status: Regular
Year Founded: 2013
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Users: 50M+
Summary: Despite their popularity in general, most social networks - and messaging apps in particular - are poor tools for effectively communicating with groups. Important messages get pushed down, event invites can be hard to find, etc.
With BAND, however, the user interface and user experience have been built for this specific purpose. Designed to help teams and team leaders communicate more easily, BAND labels itself as a tool for simplifying and streamlining group communication. And with 10-15 million visitors per month (per SimilarWeb), and just twelve employees (per LinkedIn), one would assume BAND’s operating margins are quite high.
10. eToro
5-Year Search Growth: 160%
Search Growth Status: Peaked
Year Founded: 2007
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Users: 2.8M+
Summary: Despite the industry’s recent downturn, the number of people participating in crypto has grown substantially over the past few years (it's estimated that 23% of Americans own crypto). From Twitter threads to Reddit forums, investors have proven more than willing to network, discuss, and opine on all things crypto.
In what is essentially a social network bolted onto a trading platform, eToro has taken the solitary activity of trading and turned it into a social one. In addition to allowing investors to “follow” traders - and the content and trading tips they release - traders can also allow users to quite literally copy their trading strategies. An industry first, one could argue this feature is a large part of what’s made eToro so successful.
11. Sunroom
5-Year Search Growth: 1,600%
Search Growth Status: Regular
Year Founded: 2020
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Users: Unknown
Summary: Over the past few years, adult-leaning content-sharing apps have gained enormous momentum. Many of these platforms, however, are run by men and have come under scrutiny for everything from body-shaming to pornography-related merchant account violations.
Sunroom, however, is owned and operated by women who share an aggressively body-positive, sex-worker-friendly company culture (as outlined in their Manifesto). More importantly, they’re aiming to steal market share from billion-dollar-producing competitor OnlyFans.
12. Peanut
5-Year Search Growth: 121%
Search Growth Status: Regular
Year Founded: 2016
Location: London, UK
Users: 2.5M+
Summary: One of the largest problems with today’s social networking sites is the difficulty involved in establishing real, genuine connections with strangers. From professional networking sites to dating apps, many of today’s networks seem to facilitate short-term, superficial interactions at the expense of creating real, long-term relationships.
Peanut, however, aims to solve this. With a focus on a woman’s stage of life (fertility, pregnancy, motherhood, and menopause), Peanut aims to connect women who can provide real, legitimate support to one another. In particular, they emphasize “care, empathy, and collectivism” as their core values. And with $11 million raised over four rounds since 2017, Peanut seems to be doing something right.
13. Substack
5-Year Search Growth: 5,477%
Search Growth Status: Exploding
Year Founded: 2017
Location: San Francisco, CA
Users: 500K+
Summary: Substack is an online social platform for newsletter creation. Total funding for the platform has so far exceeded $85 million.
Search interest has grown steadily since 2020 as more and more users flock to the newsletter hub. As of late 2021, the platform had accumulated more than 1 million paid subscriptions. And the top 10 content producers on the site made a cumulative $20 million that year.
14. Elpha
5-Year Search Growth: 21%
Search Growth Status: Regular
Founded: Jan 2019
Location: San Francisco, CA
Users: 100K+
Summary: From books to business gurus, products and services focused exclusively on women have proven to be highly successful. And similar to what we saw with Peanut - the women’s support app - the same principle applies to social media.
Continuing the trend of taking already successful networks and focusing them down on a sub-niche, Elpha can be thought of as LinkedIn for women (including and with a heavy emphasis on serving trans-women and non-binary people who identify as women). And that niche focus seems to be paying off – SimilarWeb shows Elpha’s website traffic continues to hover near record highs.
15. Public
5-Year Search Growth: 93%
Search Growth Status: Regular
Year Founded: 2015
Location: New York, NY
Users: 25M+
Summary: Investment app Public has received a significant amount of backing in the form of over $300 million. The social platform focuses on stocks, treasuries, crypto, ETFs, and alternative assets. Users have the option of a premium account offering advanced data and analyses for $8 per month.
There have been several spikes in search interest for Public, most recently coming in mid-2022.
16. Polywork
5-Year Search Growth: 300%
Search Growth Status: Peaked
Founded: 2020
Location: New York, NY
Users: Unknown
Summary: Polywork is a professional social network promoting collaboration. Professionals can do everything from partnering on projects to speaking on podcasts through the Polywork platform. A new group-based feature known as Clubs is currently in beta testing.
As of August 2023, Polywork has received $44.6 million in funding.
17. Caffeine
5-Year Search Growth: 42%
Search Growth Status: Exploding
Founded: April 1, 2016
Location: California, US
Users: 350K+
Summary: As multiple companies on this list have proven, taking a proven social networking concept - and cloning it to focus on a sub-niche of the industry - is a proven strategy. And what better network to clone than TikTok - the live video giant that’s risen from relative obscurity to getting more downloads than Instagram in just two years?
Meet Caffeine. Copying TikTok’s emphasis on live video, Caffeine has taken aim at the urban African-American crowd. With content that includes rap battles, street dancing, standup comedy, and more, Caffeine promotes itself through partnerships with high-profile, African American influencers and celebrities. A tactic that gained them almost half a million website visitors in March of 2022.
18. Dispo
5-Year Search Growth: 107%
Search Growth Status: Regular
Year Founded: 2019
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Users: 1M+
Summary: Formerly known as David's Disposable, Dispo is a photo-sharing app launched in 2019 by YouTuber David Dobrik and Natalie Mariduena. The original launch of the app saw it top the App Store's most downloaded free apps.
Since then, the app has rebranded as Dispo and has expanded from its initial single-layer camera to a fully-fledged social network. Dispo has seen a steady increase in Google searches since launching, with a notable spike in 2021 after the rebrand.
19. WattPad
5-Year Search Growth: 53%
Search Growth Status: Regular
Founded: Nov 7, 2006
Location: Toronto, Canada
Users: 94M+
Summary: As many forums have proven over the years, both writers and readers love to congregate around - and share their opinions about - stories. From industry heavyweights like GoodReads to erotica forums, story lovers are both highly active and voracious in their appetite for new material.
To tap into that demand, social network WattPad brands itself as the place “Where stories live”. Unlike Reddit or most storytelling forums, however, WattPad’s social network aspect makes it dramatically easier for writers to build a loyal tribe of fans (without having to market themselves). Further, they offer a host of writing tools and resources, including the possibility of getting their work published in book format or converted into a TV series or movie.
20. Crunchyroll
5-Year Search Growth: 352%
Search Growth Status: Exploding
Year Founded: 2008
Location: San Francisco, CA
Users: 120M+
Summary: While people who aren’t fans might not know it, anime is one of the largest entertainment sub-niches on the planet. In 2020, it was estimated to be worth $22.6 billion. To put that in perspective, the worldwide movie industry was worth $41 billion in 2019.
With so much money sloshing around - and so many fans - it should come as no surprise a host of blogs, forums, etc. have popped up around the anime industry. To tap into that demand, Crunchyroll offers live streaming, blog updates, and social networking (reminiscent of YouTube’s comment section) all in one. And with over 120 million users, they seem to be doing something right.
Conclusion
With some of the largest companies on the planet operating in space, the social network industry is ferociously competitive.
Despite this, startups across the globe are finding ways to steal market share by serving niche markets and meeting unmet needs. A trend we expect to continue into 2023 and beyond.
