This is according to new research from a study that looked at the amount of time people are spending on various social networking apps.
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In nearly all countries, time spent on the four leading social media apps, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter had fallen.
Snapchat was the third in line of those social media apps affected by the loss of interest in the United Kingdom, with users spending nearly three minutes less on the app, a decline of 16% from 2015 to 2016. That was the case for Twitter usage in France, which dropped from an average of 19.8 minutes per day in the first quarter of 2015 to 13.12 minutes in the first quarter of 2016.
Worryingly for Twitter, whose advertising business has seen better days, there were notable declines across all nine markets over the period.
Time spent on Telegram in the United Kingdom rose from 17 minutes a year ago to 24 minutes now, a growth of over 40 per cent growth.
It’s a similar story for Facebook-owned Instagram.
Twitter was the least popular of all the apps, while Facebook was most used, with people spending an average of 34 minutes in its app daily.
SimilarWeb’s figures for Snapchat roughly align with the 25 to 30 minutes per day the company’s 100 million users reportedly spend in the app. Snapchat installs in South Africa dropped the most, at 56 percent from year to year. Regardless of the decline, the report suggests Snapchat is outperforming Twitter now.
With the exception of Facebook usage in Spain, use of the apps in all nine nations declined in 2016, the study found.
India, Indonesia, Thailand, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Mexico and Malaysia are among the countries with the highest average number of social media accounts per person, with Japan the lowest according to the GWI Social report for Q2 2016. Facebook installs also dropped from 71% to 65%. Similarly in the United Kingdom, installs are down from 73 percent to 63 percent. Installation of some messaging apps, however, is on the rise.
Facebook of course has turned its focus onto its messaging apps as people turn to private communications between friends. Of all the countries in the study, only Spain had an increase in the amount of time that people spent on Facebook. The social network however experienced biggest loss in India, where its app installation dropped 32% to 19%.
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First is the increase in popularity of smaller, more niche social media apps such as Periscope and the encrypted messenger service Telegram, which now has 100,000,000 monthly active users.
