Snapchat is almost as popular among teenagers in the United States as Facebook is, according to a recent market analysis that was conducted by eMarketer before being picked up by Recode earlier this week. The Snap-owned social media service is reportedly used by 59 percent of people aged 12 to 17, 68 percent of those aged 18 to 24, and 42 percent of consumers aged 25 to 34. While Facebook is still convincingly beating Snapchat in the latter two demographics — capturing 77 and 81 percent of those consumers, respectively — the main social media service of the Menlo Park-based company is “only” used by 64 percent of people aged 12 to 17, which isn’t a significant lead over Snapchat considering the fact that the ephemeral messaging service is eight times smaller than Facebook, the market analysis reveals.
Snapchat currently boasts approximately 158 million daily active users, which doesn’t seem like a lot compared to 1.3 billion people who use Facebook on a daily basis, but the Venice, Los Angeles-based firm currently isn’t as focused on growth as it’s trying to increase its user engagement rates even further. Snap’s recent filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed that the average Snapchat user opens the app 18 times per day and as high retention rates are something that most advertisers are willing to reward, Snap decided to prioritize user engagement over growth for the time being.
It remains to be seen whether that will prove to be a good decision in the long term seeing how Facebook has recently been hard at work inhibiting Snapchat’s growth potential by launching a variety of Snapchat-inspired features in some of its services. While Snapchat still hasn’t made a major push outside of the United States, it remains to be seen whether the company will be able to do so in the future seeing how the likes of Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram are currently in the process of seizing a sizeable audience all over the world with functionalities like Instagram Stories, Messenger Day, and Status, all of which were seemingly inspired by Facebook’s competitor. Regardless, an update on the situation is expected to follow shortly as Snap will soon report its Q1 2017 financials.
Source : www.androidheadlines.com
