Facebook Faces A Snap Decision
Despite frequent rumours that its star is waning, Facebook is still winning the battle of the social media.
A report published this month on statista.com shows that on worldwide user numbers, its rivals have a lot of catching up to do.
Whilst Facebook has 1.6 billion active accounts, WhatsApp comes a distant second with just a billion.
Behind these come three less well known Chinese sites – QQ, WeChat and Qzone.
Lagging further behind come three more familiar networks – Tumblr with 555 million, Instagram with 400 million and Twitter with just 320 million.
Despite its market domination, all is not well at Camp Facebook.
Users seem increasingly wary of what they post on the site. According to a report from market researcher GlobalWebIndex the proportion of users who update their status during the month in October 2015 was just 33 per cent, down from about 50 per cent in October 2014.
Over the same period, the number of users who said they used Facebook to share photos had collapsed from 57 per cent to 37 per cent.
There is reason to believe that the future battle for dominance might be between Facebook and Snapchat.
The latter may only have 200 million users as yet, but is growing far faster than any rival and 67 per cent of its users actively post images.
That could result from its excellent integration with smartphones and tablet cameras.
Alternatively, it could be because Snapchat images self-destruct after viewing so are less readily abused by others.
Whatever the reason, it might just explain the many reports on the Net last week that Facebook is developing its own ‘Camera App’ to encourage users back to uploading pictures.
