• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, May 22, 2020

Social-listening platform Talkwalker and marketing-analytics firm Trust Insights are out with a new report about changing social-media habits during the crisis.

Not surprisingly, Zoom, the virtual meeting platform, is seeing some of the biggest spikes in new user interest -- which explains why Google, Microsoft and others have scrambled to offer competing features.

According to the report, Zoom is seeing more than a 2000% surge in search traffic for new account creation since the shutdown began in March.

The game Animal Crossing has seen a similar surge, per the report.

YouTube and SoundCloud have seen the steadiest daily surge of new user interest during the shutdown, with over 400 daily searches being conducted for new account creation for each service. 

YouTube and Facebook are the two biggest drivers of online activity — their lead over competitors has increased in the past two months. Each service was the subject of approximately 27.5 million searches per day when the shutdown began, but both have since been searched for by 32 million to 35 million users per day. 

“Searches relating to social-network usage increased from a low point on March 3 of 85.9 million searches per day to a peak on March 29 of 108.8 million, a 26.7% increase,” said Christopher S. Penn, cofounder-Chief Data Scientist at Trust Insights and the report’s author. “When we consider that this represents the activity of over 3 billion people, this is a massive change in the amount of time people spend social networking.” 

It will be interesting to see how those numbers hold up as the lockdown gradually lifts and once a vaccine is widely available. I’m sure these folks will still be on the case. 

Download a copy of the report here in exchange for a few personal details.