Users tiring of 'Likes' and Tweets: study
08 Jun 2016
A recent study showed that though people are updating their Facebook status more than ever, 'Likes' and Tweets, would not be taking over the world.
The social media frenzy was showing signs of petering out, research suggested, as people were starting to spend less time on social media apps.
London-based data collection company SimilarWeb studied the habits of Android users across the world to monitor the changing popularity of social media apps.
In almost all countries, time spent on the four leading social media apps, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter had fallen.
The drop in usage was minimal in some cases, with Snapchat usage in Brazil dropping from 11.23 minutes to 11.10 minutes.
A more substantial drop was seen in other social media apps with Twitter dropping from the average of 19.8 minutes over Q1 2015, in France to 13.12 in Q1 2016, a 34 per cent drop.
In a few cases such as Facebook's usage in Spain, time spent within an app saw an increase.
The study considered data from nine countries, comparing app data from the first three months of this year to the same time last year. The countries studied were Australia, France, Brazil, Germany, India, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the US.
'Across the board, people are spending less time on their Social Media apps,' said Pavel Tuchinsky, a marketing analyst at SimilarWeb.
The study found that Instagram showed the biggest drop in global usage, down 23.7 per cent year-on-year, followed by Twitter down 23.4 per cent, Snapchat 15.7 per cent and Facebook 8 per cent.
In the UK, Instagram had the biggest drop in use in the last year, while Snapchat was unusually popular. UK citizens were the third-most prolific Snapchatters, spending an average of 15 minutes on the chat app daily.
Tuchinsky, who authored the report, attributes the drop in social media use partly to the rise of a number of smaller, more niche social media apps as livestreaming video app Periscope and encrypted messenger Telegram that were competing for users' attention.
Time spent on Telegram in the UK rose from 17 minutes last year to 24 minutes currently, a growth of over 40 per cent growth.
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