Executive Summary
The days of significant increases in time spent on social networks may be over. Daily time among US users fell by 1 minute last year after growing 6 minutes in 2016 and 7 minutes in 2017. Time spent on Facebook among users is declining faster than we expected, and Snapchat is also experiencing declines. The picture is somewhat brighter at Instagram, where user time spent is still growing.
How much time are users spending with social networks?
Daily time spent among social network users ages 18 and older stopped growing last year. The 1-minute decline was a remarkable change considering the cumulative 13-minute gain in 2016 and 2017. Through 2021, we expect user time to remain relatively flat at 1 hour, 15 minutes. While that’s still a significant amount of time relative to other daily media activities, it’s clear social network usage time is entering a plateau.
What’s happening with Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat?
We have reduced our estimate of daily time spent on Facebook among US adult users to 38 minutes per day in 2018, from 40 minutes in the forecast we published October 2018. Instagram is still growing; adult users spent an average of 26 minutes per day on the app in 2018. We have lowered our estimate of users’ time spent on Snapchat to 26 minutes per day in 2018, from 27 minutes in our October 2018 forecast.
Is time spent on mobile messaging affecting social networks?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s planned pivot toward messaging will not impact social network time in the near future. We forecast that US adults will spend more than triple the amount of time on mobile social network apps this year compared with mobile messaging apps.