Back in March in my Defriending Facebook’s COO post I made the point;
Facebook faces increased challenges. In the ‘developed world’, Facebook use is already at saturation point and there are signs of nett reductions in active users. I thought of this myself when I tried to remember the last time I added a new ‘Friend’. It was well over a year ago. I have 216 Facebook friends but no more than 20 are now active. Indeed I have ‘defriended’ more than I have added in recent years.
Today we got the ‘facts’ to back this up. In the last month Facebook has lost 6m active US users and 1.4m in the UK – a 4.5% fall. In the last six months the figures are minus 9m in the US and minus 2m in the UK. Source – SocialBakers. Not only that, but the amount of time users spend of the site is starting to fall for the first time. We all know that usage of Facebook is moving rapidly from the PC to the mobile. But you would think that time spent would increase as a result.
It really does look as if Facebook has reached saturation point in the developed world. So these figures must be particularly worrying for Facebook. Just as Apple lost its ‘cool’ to Samsung, you sense that Facebook too has lost its ‘cool’. Interesting that Twitter continues to storm ahead and has retained its ‘cool’. There are a load of new social media sites snapping at Facebook too. Or maybe people are just tiring of the whole genre?
‘Free’ 1-2-1 chat is gaining in popularity; overtaking texting as the nations favourite and doing great damage to the mobile carriers revenues. As I saw on the Hong Kong MTR last week, all the young people were using chat on their smartphones. TenCent's WeChat in China has 400 million users. WhatsApp has 200m users. Live (Japan) and KakaoTalk (South Korea) are also gaining users rapidly - and not just in their own locality, I use Apple's iMessage on my iPad to talk to my grandson in Oz as its free. Maybe we don’t want to ‘share’ our innermost secrets with everybody anymore? Maybe 'chat is the new 'cool' and the biggest threat to Facebook? Note - Saira Syed at the BBC has today written an excellent article on this subject.
Worth pointing out that Facebook continues to grow – but at a historically low ‘single-digit’ rates - in countries like India and Brazil.
We will know more when Facebook reports its Q1 results this Wednesday.