In modern society, it’s virtually impossible that someone hasn’t heard of social networking giants like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly 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 2025.
1. Partiful
5-Year Search Growth: 8,700%
Global Search Volume: 81,100
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 $27.3M of funding.
2. Quest
5-Year Search Growth: 269%
Global Search Volume: 29,200
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 8 million job openings in the US alone, it's easy to see how both employers and prospective employees could benefit from the Quest App.
3. Threads
5-Year Search Growth: 214%
Global Search Volume: 3,100,000
Year Founded: 2023
Location: Los Angeles, California
Users: 200M
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.
Neymar Jr. is currently the most-followed user on Threads.
4. WeAre8
5-Year Search Growth: -38%
Global Search Volume: 3,200
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. According to PitchBook, it has received $37.2 million in funding.
5. Lemon8
5-Year Search Growth: 2,500%
Global Search Volume: 157,100
Year Founded: Apr 2020
Location: Enschede, 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: 91%
Global Search Volume: 280
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 experience 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: 112%
Global Search Volume: 4,700
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 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. Airchat
5-Year Search Growth: 200%
Global Search Volume: 10,900
Year Founded: 2024
Location: Lewes, DE
Users: 50,000+
Summary: Launched in April 2024, Airchat breaks away from traditional text-based social media by focusing on push-to-talk, voice-first public messaging. The audio-forward app produces transcripts from speech and has gained near-instant popularity.
The Airchat X account has amassed over 30,000 followers in a short space of time.
9. BAND
5-Year Search Growth: -9%
Global Search Volume: 47,400
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. With 10-15 million visitors per month (per SimilarWeb), and just 12 employees (per LinkedIn), one would assume BAND’s operating margins are quite high.
10. EToro
5-Year Search Growth: -30%
Global Search Volume: 850,900
Year Founded: 2007
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Users: 3M+
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.
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