Whopping Increase In Popularity Of Mobile Messaging Apps Makes Social Networking Sites Seem Ancient

Market Research and Advertising industry headquartered at London and Singapore, GlobalWebIndex (GWI), has released a study on Thursday. According to the study, the usage of instant messaging apps has increased by 113% in 2014 as compared to last year. The popular Facebook-owned messaging app Whatsapp rules the roost followed by Facebook Messenger in India with 52% and 42% market share. Globally, Wechat dominated as it grew swiftly with 2356% growth in user numbers between 2013 and 2014 while Whatsapp’s user count grew by 334%. According to the survey, Facebook Messanger and Skype have a growth rate of 192% and 190% respectively. Wechat is used by almost 23% of the world’s internet users.


Lately, the number of people messaging through social networking site such as Facebook, Google+ is declined. Of the total global internet users, roughly 83% and 62% have Facebook and Google+ accounts. However, only 47% and 23% actively use Facebook and Google+ website respectively. Likewise in India, 93% of internet users have Facebook account but only 48% are active users. On the global scale as well, Facebook use for messaging has declined from 402 million in Q4 2013 to 313 million in Q3 2014.

According to the research, being freely available, quicker than social networks or text messages for communication and used by many friends are the top reasons for the growing popularity of instant messaging apps. Jason Mander, GlobalWebIndex Head of Trends, said that mobile messaging apps such as WeChat and WhatsApp have seen a considerable growth in recent years. While the usage of the mobile messaging apps is an efficient way to communicate, the number of people messaging friends on social networks is now declined. Analysts are expecting the number of instant messaging users to grow in the coming quarters.

Source: Smartphone: Whatsapp most used messaging app in India, followed by Facebook Messenger: Study - The Economic Times Via #-Link-Snipped-#
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