Facebook Users Double Down On Messenger's Video Chat

How did Facebook Messenger’s 1.3 billion users engage with each other in 2017?

Compared to 2016, they spent about twice as much time using Messenger’s real-time video chat feature. That worked out to be about 17 billion video chats, according to Facebook. 

Additionally, Messenger users shared more than 500 billion emojis, in 2017, along with roughly 18 billion GIFs. On average, Messenger played host to around 7 billion conversations every day, this year.

At the same time, on average, 260 million new conversation threads were started every day, throughout the year. Not too surprisingly, the holidays saw spikes in usage on New Year’s, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day.

Groups were also big, this year. Throughout the year, 2.5 million new groups were created on Messenger every day. The average group chat includes 10 people.

Since launching a reaction feature in March, users have so far shared more than 11 billion reactions.

Yet, for all the activity on Facebook Messenger, Instagram could inspire more messaging excitement, in 2018. That’s because the Facebook unit recently began testing a standalone messaging app in smaller markets outside of the United States.

Dubbed Direct, the experimental app opens in camera mode -- just like Snapchat. Initial test markets include Israel, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and Uruguay, and Chile.

By April of this year, Direct -- still with the Instagram app -- had surpassed 375 million users.

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