… And Facebook and Instagram are thriving.
Well, not quite thriving. All the main social media sites have experienced a usage decline in 2019 (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat), but Twitters popularity has been declining steadily over the last 6 years, and its not stopping any time soon.
According to Buffer.com, Facebook has 2.23 billion monthly active users, a huge difference compared with Twitters meek 335 million.
Although all the main social media sites have experienced a usage decline in 2019 (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat), Twitters popularity has declined steadily within the last 6 years, and its not stopping any time soon.
Twitter will no longer be announcing its monthly user count, to avoid being compared other social media sites, which record their usage through this metric. Twitter blames this downfall on the fact that they have recently deleted a number of bots/spam accounts, which has affected its usage numbers. Instead, Twitter has opted to only share its daily usage count, as they believe that measuring by the number of people who use the site daily is a better indication of its popularity. Coincidentally, this metric presents the site in a slightly more optimistic view, as Twitter now (2019) has 126 million daily users (Facebook has 1.23 billion daily users), an improvement from last years 115 million, as opposed to its decrease in monthly users- 326 million to 321 million.
What I’m interested in, is whether Twitters deletion of spam accounts really is the crux of why its numbers have declined.
I’m inclined to think this is not true. I don’t use Twitter myself, nor am I aware of any of my friends using it, which is partly why I have no interest in using it myself. Unless my intention with using social media is to connect with celebrities, I have no idea what I’d even do on Twitter or who I’d follow or who I’d tweet too. In fact, I probably wouldn’t tweet at all. Instead, I feel much more comfortable posting a single photo on Instagram or scrolling through my Facebook feed.
I think a lot of millennials would agree with me in the fact that, we’d rather speak with photos, than with 140 characters and no more. Twitter’s decline in post volume records support this, which is a huge threat to its entire existence.
After all, without tweets, Twitter is nothing.
Kiaras Digital Marketing Blog 