According to Semrush, the latest financial statement of Facebook
is not an accident. The king of social networks is losing its luster.
Decidedly, the giant Meta, parent company of Facebook, is living a catastrophic week. Its latest balance sheet and the gloomy prospects for advertising revenue from iOS are weighing on the company. The latter thus suffered terrible mistrust from investors, symbolized by a stock market share that fell to 232 dollars on Friday (against 320 dollars 48 hours earlier), causing the firm of Mark Zuckerberg to lose more than 200 billion dollars in market capitalization. Unheard of for the company. Added to this is the latest study by digital marketing specialist, Semrush, which shows a decline in the popularity of Meta’s benchmark, Facebook.
The disappointments are linked on the side of Facebook
For the first time in its history, the thumbs-up social network lost users: around 4 million in the last quarter of 2021. Facebook had not yet experienced such a situation, and inevitably, this indicator, which confirms a slowdown in recruitment many users, weighs heavily in recent hours.
In addition to the fall in the number of users, small and large carriers do not see a good eye that Meta is in the process of rethinking its advertising infrastructure to continue to deliver targeted advertising via the Apple operating system. , iOS.
We are not going to say that the latest data collected by Semrush comes to drive the point home, but they confirm that Meta is going through a difficult period. And it’s finally quite logical, in the sense that its competitor TikTok has not yet reached its full development nor its user cap. Perhaps the situation will rebalance itself in a few years?
Declining requests for about two years
In the meantime, the number of searches for “delete Facebook account”, “delete Facebook account” and “how to delete Facebook account” have been numerous since January 2020. Over the past two years, these queries have been typed on average 68,022 times per month, with three peaks to report. The first in April 2020 (88,400 requests), when the personal data of 267 million users was leaked, put up for sale on a hacker forum; the second in January 2021 (81,000), with a new data leak and app developers who had access to data they should not have been able to see; and the third last March (81,000).
Over the past two years, and on a monthly average, Facebook has remained the most searched social network, with 63 million monthly requests, ahead of YouTube and its 52 million requests. Further behind are Instagram (7.2 million requests), Twitter (3.75 million), LinkedIn (3.6 million), Twitch (3 million), TikTok (1 million) and Snapchat (451,000).
Looking at trends, we still note a continuous decline for Facebook at Semrush. Searches peaked in March and April 2020, with 83 million monthly queries, falling to 55 million in October 2021, then 45 million last November and December.
Facebook is not the only major platform concerned: YouTube would follow an identical trend. And TikTok, for its part, has gone from 368,000 searches in January 2020 to 1.5 million over the last three months. It should be noted that the abyssal gap in the number of searches between a Facebook and a TikTok is probably explained by the fact that the use of the latter is done almost exclusively via the mobile application, while many users connect again to Facebook through their browser and search engine.
Source: Semrush press release
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