WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook?

 WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook?

Which is the most popular of them all?

 The last couple of months have been quiet and uninteresting. At least, there was nothing that I could get myself to write about. All that changed 36 hours ago when I realised that I couldn’t reply to a WhatsApp message. You all know the rest of the story. I have to admit that I briefly delighted in the irony that a tech giant had been felled by something as trivial as a DNS error, that most annoying of issues ordinary folks like us face all the time. Once I shook off the schadenfreude, it struck me that I had the opportunity here to study the revealed preferences of three and a half billion people worldwide, for the 3 most used social media services on earth (other than YouTube)! The largest imaginable research project! And all funded by Facebook! (At least 6 billion dollars, I am told). So, I hurriedly finished some pending (real) work, and here I am.

 Insights from an outage

The first reaction of anyone, when they realise they are unable to go on to their favourite platform, is to see if that service is down. So, it seems reasonable to assume that if we were able to track these enquiries made by people, we could get a picture of what they really prefer (as against what they say they prefer). Don’t we all know those who insist that they prefer Instagram to Facebook, in a futile attempt to pass themselves off as millennials “at heart”? And where can we get these data? Google Trends of course!

 I collected data on search trends (peak interest plotted against time) for the terms “WhatsApp”, “Instagram”, and “Facebook”, on the day of the outage. I used the trends for the term “Twitter” as control, just to make sure that there was no general increase in searches for social media. Figure 1 shows the general trends data worldwide for all the 4 search terms. Facebook has a few hundred million subscribers more than WhatsApp has worldwide (https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/), but it appears that the largest number of people felt the hit on WhatsApp most acutely. Facebook users did wake up to the outage gradually. Though the number of Instagram fans is smaller, their distress was acute and persistent.

Figure 1: Global peak interest in social media services as reflected by search trends

Peak interest (%) over time

 

 But what I found most interesting were the varying preferences across different countries. Some overwhelmingly preferred WhatsApp, while others missed Facebook the most. Some countries showed a high preference for Instagram. I realise that some of these differences may be due to the time of the day during the outage, local internet speeds, and the proportion of young people in the population. But, it appeared that there were stark differences between countries in the same region, sharing similar demographics and development levels. For example, while the Germans overwhelmingly preferred WhatsApp, the French seemed to like Facebook a lot. (Figure 2) So, I gathered that there was something more to this, and I proceeded to see if there were any patterns.

 Figure 2: Stark differences in peak interest over time between France and Germany

 

 Since the proportion of self-reported WhatsApp and Facebook users is roughly about two-thirds and half of all social media users, respectively, (https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/), it would be reasonable to expect that peak interest would be high for both. So, I treated search trends within about 30% of each other as the norm. Any deviation from this pattern, I classified (completely arbitrarily) into the following groups: 

1. Texters: Peak interest for WhatsApp more than 30 percentage points over Facebook

2. Browsers: Peak interest for Facebook over WhatsApp to the same extent as above. If you’re wondering about the nomenclature, I can’t offer you much more by way of an explanation than the fact that the average Facebook user is simply browsing most of the time, posting just once in a month! (https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-statistics/#Facebook_usage_statistics)

3. Instagrammers: On the average, about 30-40% of the interest worldwide was on Instagram. (Figure 1) So, I reckoned that peak interest in excess of 50% would identify countries which strongly preferred Instagram.

 Birds of a feather

I collected search trends data on 75 countries worldwide. I tried to include medium to large countries by population, from different regions and sub-regions. This was again rather arbitrary, and I admit, reflects popular biases. So, for instance, I divided Europe into, Scandinavia, Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe. Likewise, I treated North Africa as being different from mainland, and Southern Africa. I of course excluded China and Iran. Any interest there can only be attributed to collective gloating.

 What I found was interesting and intriguing, and totally worth the effort! Though I don’t know what all this means, I am hoping that you’ll share my enthusiasm. So, first, similar peak interest in WhatsApp and Facebook was seen in about a fifth of the countries that I surveyed. These were mainly from mainland Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, and Rwanda). Some small countries in Europe (Austria) and Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong) also showed a similar pattern. The Brits showed a similar interest in the beginning of the outage, though there was a divergence later on, but I decided to discard it as being uninteresting (no offence meant!).

 The majority of countries showed a distinct preference for either WhatsApp or Facebook. And what’s more, there seemed to be a distinct regional pattern! For example, the whole of Latin America (including Mexico) were texters. (Figure 3) As was Germanic Western Europe (Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland), the Middle-East, and Southern Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe). South Asia interestingly, was split, with India and Pakistan being the dominant texters. Unlikely companions to the Germans were the Italians and the Spanish. (Figure 3)

 Figure 3: The texters

 

Francophone Europe (France and Belgium) strongly preferred Facebook over WhatsApp. (Figure 4) The North Africans (Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco) were also avid browsers, which tempted me to think of a French connection. But that certainly didn’t explain the strong Facebook preference of Scandinavia, Finland, and the whole of Eastern Europe. East Asians (Japan, South Korea, Philippines, and Thailand) were expectedly (my bias!) all aggressive browsers, as were Bangladesh and Nepal. Australia and New Zealand also seemed to prefer Facebook, and so did the US and Canada.

 Figure 4: The browsers

 

Many of the browsers were also interested in Instagram, but three countries stood out as very aggressive Instagrammers: Japan, South Korea and Turkey. (Figure 5) Turkey, in fact seemed to be far more interested in Instagram than even in Facebook. Some other strong Instagrammers were Sweden, Australia, Portugal, and Ukraine. People in Africa had little interest in Instagram. Some countries which showed a strong interest in Facebook (Philippines, Bangladesh, Nepal and Thailand) showed practically no interest in Instagram, (Figure 4) which makes me think that they are really actually texters, using Facebook messenger.

 Figure 5: The Instagrammers

 

As you chew over these (hopefully) interesting nuggets, I have to tell you that I really don’t know if any of these patterns is a true reflection of what actually happens. And even if it does, I don’t know what it means. Perhaps it all boils down to something mundane like varying internet speeds. The differing interest in Instagram can perhaps be explained by the varying propensity for businesses to use the platform (high in East Asia, low in Africa). I am sure that there are also some simple explanations that may be obvious to residents in these countries. Please do feel free to speculate and share. I was particularly curious about the interest in Twitter in Japan, and just couldn’t find any rational explanation. (Figure 5) I don’t wish to be left feeling that all I’ve done is some unpaid market analysis for a tech giant!