Facebook fatigue is setting in across some of its biggest markets, with users across North America, Europe, Japan and Australia leaving the social network despite the reported growth in overall active users, according to new data.
The research from Socialbakers and first cited in The Guardian newspaper, found that a third (33%) of countries on Facebook saw a decline in monthly active users over the last six months, compared to about 11% over the last year.
The United States saw the largest decline in active users in the long term, down by more than 8 million in the last six months, and a 4% drop the last month alone.
In the UK, there was 4.5% drop this month, representing 2 million people no longer logging into Facebook.
Australia experienced a decline of 202,880 active users over the last six months, compared to no decline over the last year.
Users also fell in Canada, Spain, France, Germany and Japan, where Facebook has some of its biggest followings.
Developing markets now fuelling growth
Though Facebook has lost millions of users, it is still growing fast in South America. Monthly visitors in Brazil were up by six per cent in the last month to 70m.
In India the social networking site has seen a four per cent rise to 64 million.
Twitter growth
The downfall comes as alternative social networks are attracting the attention of those looking for fresh online hang outs.
The news comes as another report shows that Twitter has become the fastest growing social platform in the world, according to Global Web Index.
The research firm’s Stream Social Q1 2013 report found Facebook experienced a 35 per cent increase in total active users between Q2 2012 and Q1 2013, while Twitter experienced a 40 per cent increase over the same period. Twitter’s growth in active users also surpassed Google Plus’ 33 per cent.
“Twitter… is currently the fastest-growing social platform in the world by active users,” Brett Petersen, director of strategy consulting at Global Web Index, wrote in a blog post.
“Mobile is by far the main factor, and since Q1 2011, the number of people access the internet via a mobile phone has increased by 60.3 per cent to 818.4 million across the 31 GWI markets.”
Source: Socialbakers
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The recent and quick succession of changes to Facebook’s social algoritham’s have made the experience for users a lot less enjoyable as a social experience. The vast amount of pointless and irrelevant images coupled with numerous videos, some of which are explicit and nasty, have made people grow weary. My feed is a constant stream of bile. Granted it’s mainly content shared by people I am friends with, and one solution is to delete those friends, but I still get endless sponsored adverts, brand page updates and baby photos, it just makes visiting the site pointless. I would much rather read a quick tweet followed by a link as it’s let intrusive and I can choose whether to click the link or not. Facebook has become a graveyard for boring people with boring lives!