Aussies Dumping Facebook in Favour of Communicating via Messaging Apps, Report Claims
A large number of social media users in Australia have started rejecting Facebook in favour of communicating directly via messaging apps, such as WhatsApp as well as Snapchat.
An online poll of 2,539 people, conducted by Pure Profile, discovered that around 10 percent of Australian social media users aged 15+ have deleted their Facebook app account already; while another 23 percent users said that they may be soon doing so.
This was revealed in the latest release of the Datafication project into how the people of Australia are using social media, which was conducted by independent agency The Works in partnership with Dr Suresh Sood from UTS Advanced Analytics Institute.
The study found that millennials are leading the trend. However, Gen X as well as Gen Y are following the trend too.
Douglas Nicol, partner of The Works, attributed this sudden change to the rise of untrusted “fake news” that appears in Facebook users’ timelines & a growing reluctance to share updates with a huge numbers of so-called “friends” with whom they either have no connection or very little connection.
“This isn’t a change within the world of social media, this is a change within every way that we communicate,” he said. “Be careful, as a brand, what you do with that medium because it is potentially highly intrusive if you employ the marketing activities of the past.”
According to him, Facebook users seem to be rejecting the broadcast-style of newsfeed interaction as well as preferring return to real conversations with their close as well as real friends.
With the study revealing that around 12 million Australians now use messaging apps, there is certainly very little doubt that the popularity of messaging apps is growing.
Of these 12 million people, around 38% said that messaging apps like whatsapp & snapchat are their primary method of contact, up from 33% last year as well as around 56% said that they access an app every day.
Also, the use of Snapchat climbed 55% in the last year to 4.4m users which is just behind WhatsApp at 4.5m (up 35%). However, Facebook Messenger remained the leading platform with an increase of 18% to 10.4m.
