For the first time in a while, Meta‘s biggest apps are beating TikTok on several major metrics.
Facebook and Instagram’s third-quarter app downloads, daily usage, and monthly usage grew globally, while TikTok faced an ongoing plateau on all three metrics. It’s a positive flip for Meta since the end of 2021 when Facebook’s user base declined for the first time and had meager growth elsewhere. A few months later, Meta saw another first when its revenue declined. The company, led by co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was pummeled by constant comparisons to TikTok and investors who wanted more growth and less metaverse. Eventually, they got it.
During the third quarter, the Facebook app’s daily active users grew by 1.5% and monthly active users grew by 1.8%, according to data from Apptopia. Instagram’s daily users grew by 1.5% and monthly users grew by 1.6%. While both apps saw a drop in downloads, down 3.8% for Facebook and down 2.2% at Instagram, both fared better than TikTok. Downloads of that app, owned by China’s Bytedance, fell 12%, while daily and monthly users both fell by about 1% during the quarter.
Research from Evercore showed a similar trajectory among all three apps. Based on data from SensorTower, Evercore found daily usage of Facebook and Instagram both to be flat so far this year, while daily users of TikTok have dropped 4% over the same period.
Evercore also dug into engagement, or when people don’t just open an app but click, like, or comment on content and spend time on the app. Instagram’s engagement has grown the most, up 9% so far this year, While engagement at TikTok is up 8%. Both apps beat engagement growth on Facebook, which is up just 2% this year, although that’s a much better showing than most of 2021 and 2022 when engagement fell for several quarters.
“Overall, Facebook and Instagram both saw continued year-over-year growth in user engagement to near record high levels and solidly above 2019 levels, with modestly more constructive trends from Facebook,” Evercore wrote in a note last month.
In its quarterly report, Meta said Facebook’s total number of daily users, including web users, grew by 5%, while monthly users grew by 3%. Across all of its apps, daily and monthly users grew 7%, according to the company.
There is one metric where TikTok still has Facebook and Instagram beat: how long the average user spends on the app. Evercore found that the average TikTok user spends “a whopping” 100 minutes each day on the app, or close to two hours. Instagram’s average user spends 58 minutes a day on the app, while the average Facebook user spends about 45 minutes.
Meta has two new areas of growth, however. Reels, Instagram’s short-form video feature launched in fall 2021 to rival TikTok, is gaining ground. Meta said Reels is now “revenue neutral” in its quarterly report, meaning it’s no longer losing the company money. Instagram head Adam Mosseri also noted recently in a video that Reels now accounts for “about half of the time spent on Instagram.”
Then there’s Threads, the Meta app launched in July to rival Twitter. Early excitement quickly dropped off, but as the app launched more features, users returned. The app currently has about 33 million daily users, and 100 million monthly users. In discussing quarterly results, Zuckerberg said he’s “very happy” with Threads growth so far and made clear his ambition to get it to 1 billion users.
“If we keep at this for a few more years,” he said, “we have a chance of achieving our vision there.”
Are you a Meta employee or someone with a tip or insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at [email protected], on secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a non-work device.
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