Dive Brief:
- Is the U.S. reaching peak Facebook? According to eMarketer, although Facebook’s average daily time spent will continue to grow, but has slowed to a crawl and will only increase by one minute by 2018.
- Still, this year U.S. adults are expected to spend an average of 22 minutes a day on Facebook and 43 minutes a day on social media overall. By 2018, that number will grow 5.3% for Facebook and 5.9% for social media as a whole.
- It's important to note that all of Facebook’s growth in the coming years is expected to come from its mobile app rather than the desktop platform.
Dive Insight:
Behind that steady growth is the increasingly popular video format.
“Facebook continues to see increases in time spent on mobile largely due to increased engagement with video,” eMarketer forecasting analyst Monica Peart explained. “Of course, Facebook has also been facing competition from other fast-growing social networks like Snapchat, and cannibalization from its own property, Instagram. With other social networks investing heavily in making video a core feature of their platforms, their collective time spent will begin to challenge that of Facebook.”
Even if its daily use growth is slowing down, Facebook just posted a very strong Q1 earnings report with a 52% year-over-year revenue increase to $5.38 billion, surpassing Wall Street estimates. It also revealed reaching the 1.65 billion monthly active user benchmark, up from 1.59 billion in the last quarter.
Marketers should take note that the social network will likely continue its push into mobile, and that if they want to take part in that growth, video is where they should start. In the earnings report Facebook said mobile advertising accounted for 82% of overall ad revenue, up from 73% year-over-year. And according to eMarketer, U.S. adults will spend an average of 21 minutes a day using social networks on smartphones this year.