Tumblr, Snapchat take the lead as fastest growing social media handles

According to a survey by the Global Web Index, Facebook is the world's largest social network by some margin, with at least 1.35 billion active monthly users. However, when it comes to picking up new users, the website seems to have reached its limit.

The Global Web Index notes that Tumblr's active user base in the last six months grew by 120%, while Facebook's grew by only 2%. In overall member growth, Pinterest took the lead with 57% growth while Facebook's member base grew by 6%.

Also, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and even Google+ all grew faster than Facebook.

Specifically in mobile apps, while Facebook is the largest app today, Snapchat — with an emphasis on teen and 20-something users — is the fastest growing of them all, up 56% this year. The app is however, closely followed by Facebook Messenger and Instagram. This is quite significant in the company's growth, as its push to drive more users to the standalone app by cutting out Messaging from the main app has helped it grow.

When GWI released numbers earlier this year, Instagram topped the list for fastest-growing social network. It has now dropped down to number three, both in terms of overall members and active users.

"Facebook has some major challenges to face,” Jason Mander, head of trends and author of the report, writes. "Firstly, people are growing tired of it, with 50% of members in the UK and US saying that they're using it less frequently than they used to (rising to 64% among teens)."

He says that the stats appear to show people using Facebook much more passively today than in the past: "Since the start of 2013, we've seen behaviors like sharing photos and messaging friends fall by around 20 percentage points."

Nevertheless, one cannot deny the size and strength of the world's largest social network. Facebook's active user base of 1.36 billion means that over one-third of the world's population is now on Facebook.

GWI — which bases its data on interviews with 170,000 users across 32 markets — provides some of its own stats to demonstrate just how big it is. It notes that outside of China, 4 in 5 internet users have a Facebook account, with the proportion even higher in some markets like Latin America, where a whopping 93% of respondents reporting having an account.

Among those with Facebook accounts, 1 in 2 say they are actively using Facebook each month, "giving it about twice as many active users as the three sites which compete for second position: Twitter, YouTube and Google+."

Check out the gallery below to see how each of the social media platform and apps are doing according to GWI.