from Statista.com

— this post authored by Felix Richter

While Twitter (NASDAQ:TWTR) has a loyal and active community of users, the microblogging service is struggling to attract new people and get to the next level in terms of mainstream appeal.

After explosive growth in the first years of its existence, Twitter’s growth slowed down significantly once the company had reached 300 million users.

Over the past two years, Twitter gained just 31 million active users, which is disappointing for a company trying to become a global platform for the exchange of ideas and information. It is even more disappointing though when considering how quickly competing platforms have grown in the same period of time.

WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook, all owned by Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) notably, each gained more users in the past two years than Twitter has in total. Meanwhile Snapchat, arguably the platform of the hour, added nearly three times as many daily active users as Twitter did monthly active users since the end of 2014.

This chart illustrates how many active users selected social media platforms have added in 2015 and 2016.