In 2021, Facebook informed us about the trouble they have been facing because of TikTok. This year, it has only upscaled.
It has been reported that the short format video app, TikTok has been eating Facebook from the inside. Initially, it was luring Facebook users and now, TikTok has been challenging the Meta-owned platform with a news source. Because of this, Facebook has been facing difficulty in generating revenue and its users are growing at a very low pace.
It has further been notified that if Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) would like to beat TikTok, he will have to copy it as soon as possible, as per Reuter’s report.
Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company that has reported revenue growth of 7% year on year, has notified that this is the year when the company faced the slowest pace, compared to a decade of performance.
Facebook’s daily active users have gone to less than 2% from the 2021 end to mid of 2022. Though the shares have further risen from 15% in after-hours trading, this is just because it has been witnessed that there has been much damage already done to the platform.
Meta has taken a beating as per the report filed in February when it partly blamed TikTok for a first quarterly decline in user growth of Facebook. The stock is still down to 40% this year, which is double the fall in the Nasdaq 100 index.
TikTok has not disclosed any numbers at the time of writing– but it has been stated that they are likely to be heading in the opposite direction soon. TikTok has been reportedly having around 1.6 billion global monthly active users in the first quarter of 2022- which is lesser than Facebook’s 2.9 billion though, but the platform has taken a massive jump of around 45% compared to the last year’s performance, as per the report of Data.ai.
Certainly the reason is the content. It has been stated that the videos on TikTok are compelling enough that the viewers send the content creators quasi-cash gifts. As per the first quarter, users doled around $840 million on TikTok- which is a record amount for any platform in app or gaming category, as reported by Data.ai.
In the last quarter of 2021, TikTok was entitled for becoming the first app to surpass games like "World of Warcraft" and "Genshin Impact" in terms of consumer spending.
But there was a new threat is the news- as in September 2021, Facebook was a regular news source for around 31% of Americans and TikTok has just 6% users for the same, as per the Pew Research Center report.
But this year, when Ukraine-Russia war initiated n February – it brough TikTok a host of new user footage from that country which certainly changed that dynamic.
As per the report of Reuters, it was tsated taht the views of #Ukraine-tagged posts witness a tremendous growth from 6.4 billion on February 2022 to around 40 billion (at the time of writing), as per TikTok. Furthermore, in March the White House further briefed about around 30 app which got influencers about the war.
Facebook has been working continuously to compete its rival TikTok. Facebook’s own own video feed, Reels were launched in September 2021 (last year) which certainly helped the platform to upscale its followers. But the platform has to go faster to compete with the ever rising traffic of it’s competitor.
It has further been reported that 37% of the monthly active Facebook users are also using TikTok app, and this is around 51% for Instagram, as per the research of Cowen.
