Social media losing charm and declining worldwide

New Delhi: Going through all our social media accounts is a daily activity, which has made us less social and more smartphone social. Yes, it might seem that every other person is updating his status but a recent study tells us a different story.

A new research suggests that the social media rage is dying down, as people have started to spend less time on social media apps.

A London-based data collection company SimilarWeb studied the habits of Android users from nine countries across the world, to monitor the changing popularity of social media apps. The countries who were involved in the study was US, UK, Germany, Australia, Spain, India, South Africa, Brazil and France.

The time spent in almost all countries on the four leading social media apps, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter have either fallen or are same as last year.

The report by SimilarWeb said: “Aside from time spent on Social Media apps, Current Installs were also mostly down when comparing March 2015 to March 2016. On all 4 social apps in the 9 countries examined, installs were down an average of 9%.”

People were spending almost an average of 34 minutes in social media apps daily. Twitter was the least popular of all the apps, while Facebook was most used and Instagram being the closest rival was at 17 minutes of daily use.

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Data analyst Pavel Tuchinsky, who authored the report, also gave two reasons for the drop, which could be firstly because the popularity of more niche social media apps such as livestreaming video app Periscope and encrypted messenger Telegram gaining users attention. Secondly he said that "We see a trend towards privacy, and towards more individual communications."

There is a total 9 per cent drop in the number of the big four social media apps – Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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