The top social media companies ready for industry disruption

ByteDance is the technology company best positioned to benefit from future social media disruption in the sector, according to GlobalData analysts.

The China-based company comes top of the list in a ranking of overall leadership in the themes that matter most among social media companies.

These themes, which can be defined as any issues that keep CEOs awake at night, describe technological, macroeconomic and industry-specific challenges that companies are currently facing, as well as the opportunities they create. GlobalData's Thematic Research ecosystem identifies and tracks these challenges, and how they create the long-term winners and losers of the social media industry.

ByteDance scored highly in several areas, particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence, digital media and generation hashtag, where it received top marks of five out of five.

ByteDance received scores of four for ecommerce, gaming, Covid-19 and antitrust; three for M&A and digital payments; and two for data privacy performances.

These scores represent GlobalData analysts' assessments of the competitiveness of each company regarding a particular theme. They are then weighted based on their importance and used to create the final industry ranking.

ByteDance is followed in our ranking by Microsoft, Airbnb and Bumble.

The interactive graphic below allows you to compare company ratings across the 10 themes in question. The higher up a company is on the list, the better positioned it is to weather disruption in the future, while the companies at the bottom are more vulnerable to disruptive threats.

Click on any of the companies to compare them across all the themes in our analysis.