Has Facebook peaked? Most users have made major changes to social media use
Bottom Line: Most Americans have social media accounts and the biggest of them all is of course Facebook. According to the Pew Research Center 68% of all Americans have a Facebook account. As we’re preparing for the 2018 midterm elections while still digesting what happened with our information on Facebook during the 2016 election, it’s clear that most users aren’t waiting for Facebook to figure it all out for them. Pew found the following...
74% of Facebook users have made significant changes to Facebook usage this year
The top change has been enhanced use of privacy settings with 54% having made adjustments but the second biggest change is even more significant. 42% of all Facebook users have taken a break from using the platform with 26% going so far as to deleting the Facebook app(s) from mobile devices. In recent months I’ve taken time to demonstrate examples of tech titans that dominated industries only to become quickly irrelevant (AOL, Prodigy, NetScape, Palm, Research in Motion, Yahoo, etc.). History suggests there’s a strong chance Facebook could be in a similar position. I’d mentioned that there’s no better than a 50-50 chance that Facebook would be as relevant ten years from now as it is today and with these latest findings, there’s increasingly the likelihood that Facebook’s already peaked in the US.
Given the pervasiveness of Facebook habit changes, if you have actual friends and family that seemingly aren’t showing you the Facebook love you were once accustomed to, you probably don’t want to read much into it because they’re probably just not using it the way they once did.