The research made by eMarketers has shown that daily users visits to Facebook will diminish with up to 2 minutes during the recent year. The official statistics indicate that currently, people are used to surf Facebook social network for 38 minutes every day. These numbers are almost the same as in 2018. However, it is predicted to be dropped to 37 minutes until the new year arrives. Somehow, this is a demotion when compared with the statistic of the third quarter of 2018.
Facebook experiences a loss of younger adult users that is undergoing for several months now. Additionally, the platform’s struggle and attention on downranking clickbait posts or videos and promoting those that lead to `time well spent`, had, in the long run, a reduction of the duration of the visits on the platform in the previous year, slightly different from the predictions made for 2019.
Facebook & Snapchat level
Two years ago, Facebook users tended to spend about 41 minutes every day. In 2018, we saw a slight drop, as a result of which only 38 minutes were spent on Facebook every day. Also, the average duration of Snapchat session has levelled, as revealed by eMarketer`s predictions, meaning that adults are anticipated by 2021 to allow about 26 minutes for the app on everyday bases. Of course, it is a diminishment from the 28-minutes daily that were originally predicated for Snapchat`s 2019 usage.
An important fact to note is that this research focused on users aged 18 and older, whilst Snapchat observed that it accesses up to 90% users between 13 and 24 years of age in the US. Simply put, eMarketer`s analysis does not take into account the pool of users who are between 13 and 17 years.
Instagram`s predictions
eMarketer believes that Instagram users will end up allowing around 27 minutes daily for using the app, going up a minute from 2018. Hence, this number is said to continuously grow with a minute each year up until 2021. Anyway, even if we take this enlargement into account, the basic duration of Instagram usage is 8 minutes longer in comparison with the general time for using the Facebook social network.
Why is this important?
The broad view of this analysis underlines the fact that the average duration of users’ daily sessions on social networks in the US alone, significantly diminishes by up to 1.5 minutes since 2018. This is a number expected to keep the same until the end of 2019.
Some say that what was gained via digital video viewing is what influences the social time, while gaming also competes for user attention. Even though there is no official research to back up this presupposition, the growth in such activities and social media time it is said to not have a significant imprint on user engagement on those channels.
The impact of these plateau number is prone to have little to no immediate influence on ad campaign costs or results. Social media time may be reaching a turning point, yet people still use these tools. So, while Facebook does not seem to experience growth in time spent, the platform still performs better than it is the case of the time spent on Instagram.
However, this analysis from eMarketer cannot be useful for those that seek to target an audience that is younger than 18 years old.
