The Truth Behind Facebook’s Drop In Users: ‘There Is No Story’

 

You’ve probably seen a number of headlines circulating today about Facebook’s drop in users, backed up by figures from SocialBakers. According to stories on The Guardian and other sites, Facebook is being “deserted” by millions of users in markets like the U.S., Russia and the U.K. As is usual with any story of this profile, the stats get unleashed and glorified as people cry out that Facebook might be nearing the beginning of the end. It’s not, and here’s why.

 

1) “There Is No Story!”

 

Socialbakers issued a blog post on its website telling users that there is no story, and that The Guardian got it wrong (again). Its CEO Jan Rezab explained that the numbers were provided as an estimate for advertisers and shouldn’t be used to determine Facebook traffic accurately.

 

 

2) There Is A Bigger Picture

 

While this particular story focuses around the drop in users over a one month period, it should be understood that this is an incredibly short amount of time to judge any movement in traffic as anything other than a blip. This could be affected by anything from seasonality to a brief spurt of behaviour from the allure of new services. For context, take a look at the trend in users for the UK and U.S. for a year as opposed to one month, from the same source:

 

Both the UK and the U.S. are clearly in the green here, showing the complete opposite of a small, one month trend.

 

3) We’ve Heard This Before, And Facebook Is Still Here

 

In 2011, there were reports of a huge slowdown in growth for Facebook.

 

And similar stories were published in 2012.

 

In fairness, while these articles were addressing a slowdown in growth instead of a drop in users, the fact remains that online traffic trends are cyclical. At any point there can be a dip, yet as we’ve already seen, year-on-year Facebook users are growing. Looking at monthly trends isn’t all that indicative as history shows us.

 

4) A Change In Traffic

 

While these figures may specifically address traffic to Facebook, this isn’t the only thing it owns. We all know the importance of mobile and Facebook’s strategy here isn’t always restricted to Facebook itself. Last year’s purchase of Instagram seems to be working and one year after the purchase, Instagram users have more than tripled from 30 million to 100 million users.

 

The Truth Behind Facebook’s Drop In Users: ‘There Is No Story’