The war for consumer attention is heating up and becomes more complex. The recent launch of Meta’s new platform Threads, sparked a war with Twitter likely to reach the court. It is not unusual as the social media platforms are fighting for screen time between themselves but also with the traditional media, radio, TV and newspapers.
The top sources of information accessed by Romanians are television (70%), social media – Facebook, Instagram, etc. (68%) and online media – news sites, portals, etc. (56%), according to data from the Reveal Marketing Research study writes eToro analyst for Romania, Bogdan Maioreanu. . Other alternatives are radio (38%), podcast (24%) or print media – newspapers/ magazines (23%).
For the Romanian public, since the pandemic peak, the average time spent on social media has decreased to 2 hours and 26 minutes per day in Q1 2023, reveals a study by GWI. On average European users are staying 2 minutes less on different platforms from the pandemic peak. The US users are spending 5 minutes more. An interesting trend emerges with Gen Z (people born between 1996 and 2010) being 30% more likely to worry about the amount of time they spend on social media. As a result we are seeing a resurgence of the dumb phones, used only for calls and texts. Nokia said it sold tens of thousands of flip and slide „feature phones” — which include added capabilities like GPS or music storage — in the US in each month of 2022, despite sales of the devices being down globally, per CNBC.
When it comes to most used social platforms and apps, the study is showing that outside China, WhatsApp is the favorite app, followed by Instagram and Facebook, putting the Meta conglomerate in the top preferences of users with over 62%. Next is TikTok with 9% followed by Twitter with 5% and Facebook Messenger and Telegram with 3%.
Probably one of the most interesting finds of the study is how the audiences overlap in social media. 78% of Facebook users are also using Instagram, and 73% are using WhatsApp. Between 50 and 60% of users of all other social media apps are also users of Tiktok. Among the users of the professional network LinkedIn 87% are also on Facebook while 65% are Twitter users and 52% are also on Tiktok.
While 69% of Facebook users access the app to keep up with friends and family, 53% are using it for news. Twitter is a news seekers favorite with 59% of its users accessing it for this feature. Instagram is about sharing photos or videos but for 58% of its users their purpose is to follow brands and products, compared to 36% of Twitter users. Tiktok is more for fun – with 62% of the users accessing it for entertaining content, while only 26% to follow brands or products. This explains the multitude of trends started on Tik Tok, some dangerous or antisocial aimed to generate the entertainment value users expect.
For Romanian investors, Meta dominance in the social media space is important as the company was ranked 7th among the most held stocks, at the end of Q2 2023 on eToro platform. Their trust, despite setbacks last year in the metaverse development, was rewarded, as Meta Platforms stock gained 134% from the beginning of the year. The strong performance may have led to a 10% drop in the number of Meta stockholders as some took out their profits.
Facebook ran ads in Moldova for an oligarch sanctioned by the U.S.
