A Deeper Look at FB, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter

When we look at behavior data across many different social networks, it is interesting that not all social networks are created equal. Behavioral patterns are the key things to look for, especially with the ones I’m going to look at here. It is key to know if consumers are behaving in a way that works with the current monetization plans. For example, if no one watched video on Facebook all the while the company was trying to monetize their video strategy, we would know that would yield little value to an advertiser. We do know watching video is the second most common behavior on Facebook by the general global population, so it seems Facebook’s move here is a good idea. If Twitter came out and said they had a huge strategy to monetize “Moments” and were selling packages to advertisers, I would know this is a bad idea because only 3% of their user base uses Moments on a monthly basis.

With all the ways I can slice our analysis of the major social media services, I always find it helpful to remember these services depend on the most valuable part of a consumer’s life — their time. So I think looking at usage frequency is a great starting point to know which social network services are leading the pack and which are struggling.

The key question is, which social networks are a daily habit? Or, in some cases, a more than once a day habit. Below is the key chart.

The key stat here is the percentage of people with active accounts on these services who say they use it daily. Having the “more than once daily” option is really icing on the cake. Companies that have this have a disproportionate engagement of time than those who just have a strong percent of daily interactions with their customers. Clearly, there are social networks here with dramatically more users than others. Facebook has over a billion, WeChat has nearly 800 million and Instagram has 600 million or so. Snapchat is rumored t have 150-200 million and Twitter has approximately ~300-350 million. Knowing the proportion of users certainly is helpful when looking at this chart but also strengthens the case for the likes of Facebook and Instagram when we know how many users they have and how engaged most of their users are with the service.

I make the point that Snapchat is more like Twitter than Facebook (to much heated debate in emails from readers), but this data tells the story. Both are tiny on the grand scale of active accounts and both dramatically trail other services in daily engagement. While these stats cover a global population, if I isolated only millenials via this data on Snapchat, it would show much higher daily engagement. Everyone knows they own millenials, unfortunately, to make the claim they are trending more like Facebook, you need to look at every demographic, not just teens and 20-somethings.

I mention WeChat, isolated to only China responses, to show how engaged this service is in China. It shows us WeChat is much more like a social network than just a messaging platform. WeChat is, for all accounts and purposes, the true Chinese operating system. Key point is WeChat, and their nearly 800 million active users, has similar dynamics to Facebook.

Lastly, and another reason I am bullish on Facebook, is while their unique user number is well over a billion and heading toward two billion, the sheer number of humans using different apps/servivces in the Facebook family is massive. Besides the number of Facebook and Instagram users, they have over 900 million people using Facebook Messenger. They also have WhatsApp with around a billion users. Each of these is a dedicated service for Facebook to monetize besides just the Facebook service. This is truly global scale the likes we have not seen before. While Google is well positioned to benefit from the offline to online advertising shift, Facebook will remain the single biggest beneficiary of this shift and the most dominant player in it. This is likely to be a “winner take most” scenario and I think Facebook is that winner. What’s more is, there doesn’t appear anyone remotely close to challenging that dominance on the playing field.