Commentary

Social Media App Use Is... Declining?

For some years there’s been a cottage industry devoted to predicting the demise, or at least the stagnant plateau, of social media – a fun, inconsequential hobby that I fully admit to having dabbled in before. The only problem is that we were always wrong: for reasons that have never been clear to me, human beings seem to have an insatiable need to gorge on funny cat videos and other people’s vacation photos. Social media usage, measured in number of users, total time spent, and average time spent, has climbed inexorably to the point where it’s kind of surprising anyone gets anything done anymore.

That’s why I must take the latest data from online market analytics firm SimilarWeb, which appear to show social media usage declining by a significant margin, both in terms of time spent and current device installs, with a biggish grain of salt. However the findings are certainly food for thought (salt, food, who says I’m mixing metaphors?).

According to SimilarWeb, average time spent on social media apps including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram declined globally, with drops in most big markets including the U.S., UK, France, Brazil and Australia.

For example, the average amount of time U.S. Facebook users spent on the social app daily decreased from 48.75 minutes in the first quarter of 2015 to 45.48 minutes in the first quarter of 2016, for a 6.7% drop over this period. Meanwhile average time spent fell 9.8% from 40.32 minutes to 36.37 minutes in the UK; 15.3% from 35.2 to 29.8 minutes in France; 8.9% from 48.33 minutes to 44.03 minutes in Brazil; and 23.4% from 47.63 minutes to 40.03 minutes in Australia.

Twitter experienced even bigger proportion declines, with the average amount of time spent on the app in the U.S. falling 28% from 18.73 minutes in the first quarter of 2015 to 13.5 minutes in the first quarter of 2016. Similar declines were seen in all the other markets tracked by SimilarWeb.

The average amount of time spent on the Instagram app in the U.S. tumbled 32% from 29.38 minutes to 19.93 minutes over this period. Again, similar declines were seen in other countries. And average time spent on the Snapchat app in the U.S. fell 19.2% from 23.17 minutes to 18.72 minutes over the same period.

Furthermore, SimilarWeb found that the number of devices with social media apps installed dropped by around 4% globally, although there were some important exceptions in certain markets outside the U.S.

In the U.S., the proportion of mobile devices with the Facebook app installed slipped from 71.56% in the first quarter of 2015 to 68.01% in the first quarter of 2016, while the comparable figures for the UK slid from 73.22% to 66.3%, France fell from 70.35% to 62.38%, and Brazil fell from 84.06% to 76.23%. It’s worth noting that while other social apps also saw broad declines in current declines globally, in the U.S. Instagram installs edged up from 38.04% to 40.77% of devices.

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