List of All Social Media Platforms (and Which Ones a Business Needs)

Nobody can give you a truly complete list of all social media platforms. New apps launch every month, regional networks rarely make English-language lists, and the line between a social network, a messaging app and a forum keeps moving. What you can have is a list of every platform that a business is realistically likely to need, grouped by what each one is actually for. That is what this guide is.

It starts with the common social media platforms almost everyone knows, moves through the professional social media platforms, the visual and video apps, messaging, communities and niche social media platforms, and ends with a short way to decide which of them deserve your time. No user counts are quoted here: they change every quarter and every source reports them differently, so a list that leans on them is out of date the day it is published.

The common social media platforms

These are the networks that come up first in almost every list of social media platforms, because between them they cover most of the people a business wants to reach.

For most small businesses the shortlist is shorter still. Instagram and TikTok are where people discover something new; Facebook is where local communities and groups still gather; YouTube is where people search for how to do something; and X is where real-time conversation happens. Everything else on this list is worth knowing about, but few businesses need to be everywhere.

Professional social media platforms

Professional social media platforms are built around work rather than friends: hiring, industry news, building a reputation in a field. They matter most for B2B companies, consultants, recruiters, agencies and anyone whose customers are making a decision at work.

• LinkedIn: the default professional network, used for hiring, thought leadership and B2B selling.
• Xing: a professional network used mainly in German-speaking countries.
• GitHub: where developers share code, follow projects and build a public track record.
• Behance and Dribbble: portfolio networks for designers, illustrators and creative studios.
• Medium and Substack: publishing platforms with social features, used for long-form writing and newsletters.
• Product Hunt: a launch community where new software products are posted and discussed.

If your customers are other businesses, one of these usually matters more than any of the consumer platforms. A software company will often get more from a steady presence on LinkedIn and a launch on Product Hunt than from a daily TikTok habit.

Visual and video social media platforms

These platforms are built around the picture or the clip first and the words second. They reward businesses that have something to show: food, products, places, before-and-after results, a process people find satisfying to watch.

• Instagram: photos, carousels, Reels and Stories, with discovery driven mainly by Reels.
• TikTok: short vertical video and photo carousels, shown to people who do not follow you yet.
• YouTube and YouTube Shorts: long tutorials that keep being found through search, plus short vertical clips.
• Pinterest: ideas people save to plan a purchase, a project or an event.
• Snapchat: casual video and Stories, mostly between friends.
• Twitch and Kick: live streaming, mostly gaming but increasingly anything done live.

Short vertical video now runs through almost all of them. A video made for TikTok will usually work as an Instagram Reel and a YouTube Short with a different caption, which is why so many businesses treat short video as one job and three destinations.

Messaging apps that work like social networks

Messaging apps are not always counted in a list of social media platforms, but for many businesses they are where customers actually talk to them. Channels, groups and business profiles have turned several of them into broadcast platforms as well as chat apps.

• WhatsApp: personal messaging, business accounts and broadcast channels, owned by Meta.
• Messenger: Facebook's messaging app, tied to Facebook Pages.
• Telegram: messaging plus public channels that work like broadcast feeds.
• Discord: community servers with chat and voice rooms, popular with gaming and online communities.
• WeChat: messaging, payments and mini-programs, central to everyday life in China.
• LINE and KakaoTalk: the dominant messaging apps in Japan and South Korea respectively.

Community and discussion platforms

Discussion platforms are where people ask each other for recommendations, which makes them valuable and also easy to get wrong. Most of these communities dislike being sold to, so the businesses that do well on them answer questions rather than post ads.

• Reddit: thousands of topic communities, each with its own rules on self-promotion.
• Quora: questions and answers across every subject.
• Nextdoor: neighbourhood networks where local businesses get recommended.
• Tumblr: blogs and reblogging, with strong fandom and creative communities.
• Mastodon and Bluesky: decentralised alternatives to X, run on open protocols.

Niche social media platforms

Niche social media platforms gather people around one interest, which makes them small but unusually well targeted. For a business inside that interest, a niche network can be worth more than a large general one, because everyone there already cares about the thing you sell.

Regional social media platforms

Any list of all social media platforms that only covers American apps misses much of the world. If you sell in a particular country, it is worth checking which networks people there actually use before copying a plan built for the US.

• China: WeChat, Weibo, Douyin (ByteDance's Chinese counterpart to TikTok), Xiaohongshu and Bilibili.
• Russia: VK and Telegram.
• Japan: LINE and X, which is unusually popular there.
• South Korea: KakaoTalk and Naver's services.

Top social media platforms for business

The top social media platforms for business are not the biggest ones. They are the ones where your customers already spend time in the mood your product suits. A wedding photographer and a payroll software company should not have the same list.

How to choose from the list of social media platforms

1. 1Start from your customer, not the platformWrite down who buys from you and where they look for what you sell. That list usually names two or three platforms on its own.
2. 2Match the format to what you haveIf you have things to show, choose visual and video platforms. If you have opinions and expertise, choose text and professional networks.
3. 3Be honest about the cadence you can keepMost platforms reward steady posting. Choose only as many as you can post on every week for months, not for the first fortnight.
4. 4Claim your name everywhere elseEven on platforms you will not use yet, register your business name so nobody else does, and point the profile at your website.
5. 5Review after three monthsLook at where enquiries actually came from. Drop the platform that brought nothing and give its time to the one that worked.

Managing several platforms without burning out

The common mistake is copying one post across every platform. Each network has its own length, its own tone and its own idea of a good hashtag, and a caption written for LinkedIn reads strangely on TikTok. The other mistake is the opposite: writing everything from scratch for every platform until the effort becomes unsustainable.

The middle path is one idea, adapted per platform. A single subject becomes a vertical video for TikTok and Instagram, a short post for X and a slightly longer one for LinkedIn. A scheduler then spreads them across the week so you are not posting everything at once.

This is the job PostOtter was built for on Instagram, TikTok and X. It generates the content from your own site, writes each caption for its platform, schedules the week and publishes directly. It does not post to Facebook Pages, and it does not handle direct messages, so if those platforms are central to your plan you will want another tool alongside it.