Although Facebook’s perch on top of the global social media landscape remains solid, new survey data from GlobalWebIndex show a slight reduction in usage for the network in the last six months.
The good news for Facebook? That perch is very solid; according to GlobalWebIndex’s survey, drawn from a sample of more than 40,000 Internet users in 32 global markets, excluding China, an impressive 82% of users worldwide have Facebook accounts.
And 48% of those users reported actively using or contributing to Facebook at least once a month during the first quarter of this year. That’s a decline of 6% since the third quarter of 2013.
Also declining in the monthly usage results: Twitter (3%), YouTube (8%) and Google+ (1%), the networks that trail Facebook in account ownership and active usage in the survey data.
As usage shifts ever so slightly away from bigger networks, platforms like Instagram and Tumblr and mobile messaging apps, like Snapchat and WhatsApp, are gaining. Instagram showed an active usage gain of 25%. Tumblr at 22% and Pinterest (7%) also showed healthy increases.
“Clearly, sites like Facebook are no longer the automatic “go-to” point for all of our networking activities,” Jason Mander, GlobalWebIndex’s head of trends, wrote in a blog post. “It’s not that they’ve been abandoned – far from it; Facebook, Google+, Twitter and YouTube are still the “big 4″ which dominate in terms of active usage. But as the online space has become more crowded and competitive, our research shows that the one-site-fits-all model of networking continues to lose a little ground as certain behaviors migrate to other platforms.”
The GlobalWebIndex report also found significant growth in the use of mobile apps, including Facebook (+9%), YouTube (+13%), Twitter (+14%) and Google+ (+14%): “But messaging services are growing at the fastest rate, with Snapchat the biggest climber of all (+67%). Snapchat’s total user base remains relatively small but it is performing particularly well in the US, UK, Ireland and Australia and it has enjoyed an especially strong rise among teens (+95%).”
Download a free summary of the report here.
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