We’ll give business folks the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they spend most of their mobile time messaging clients and colleagues, organizing their calendars, and combing through the
trades for fresh leads.
Yet, after tracking 100,000 corporate mobile devices over the past 12 months, Wandera found that professionals spend plenty of time slacking off on social media.
“Our analysis shows that these services use about 15%-20% of a typical wireless user’s monthly data allocation,” according to Michael Covington, VP of product strategy at the
mobile security startup.
“In other words, for every $100 spent on a mobile bill, [business professionals] are spending $20 to post pictures of their kids, pets and vacations for
others to enjoy,” Covington calculates.
To be fair, professionals seem to do much of their social networking on their own time.
Among this demographic, Wandera found that the
most popular time of day to use Instagram and Snapchat is just after 7 p.m. during the work week. Overall, use of these apps peaked on Sunday.
What’s everyone doing during their digital
break time? As Wandera finds, their mobile habits are quite similar to those of the larger population.
Most notably, Instagram appears to be the big winner among business types -- and
it’s coming at Snap’s expense.
Indeed, the average Instagram user consumed 42.9 MB per day during the second quarter of the year, while the average over the past 12 months was
25.18 MB.
Meanwhile, the average Snapchat user consumed 20.8 MB per day during the second quarter, while the average over the past 12 months was 22.4MB.
Put another way, the average
Instagram user consumed a total of 9.19 GB over the past 12 months, while the average Snapchat user consumed 8.19 GB.
What explains Instagram’s rising star, and the slow decline of
Snapchat among professionals
In a word, theft, says Joel Windels, VP Marketing at Wandera. “It looks like Instagram’s slew of copycat features are swiftly luring Snapchat fans over
to their platform,” Windels said on Wednesday.
Additionally, “Our data suggests that most employees that use Instagram also use Snapchat, implying that many people are seeing less
reason to use Snapchat as Instagram becomes more feature-rich,” Windels explains.
For employers, Windels said it’s also worth considering that as this new functionality is added,
the apps are becoming increasingly data-hungry.
That means they’re “eating up mobile data plans... and giving employers something to think about.”