In late October I published a survey about messaging applications. It is time now to look at the results.
I’ll start by saying that even though I didn’t ask respondents to indicate their country, I believe most of the results came from US and Europe (based on time people answered and email addresses provided), meaning, APAC is hardly represented in the results.
The first thing to look at is age as it is expected that different age groups have different behaviors. Most of the respondents are at the age of 20-40 (62%), next are those over 40 (35%). This means that results don’t really reflect behaviors of users less than 20 years old.
I asked what messaging apps people use and gave the option to select multiple answers. The interesting part for me here was not so much which ones are being used but how many apps people use on weekly basis.
We can see that almost 60% are using 3 or more messaging apps on weekly basis.
When we look at the distribution between the apps there are the clear leaders we all know of: WhatsApp, Facebook and Skype but there is also SMS. Since question was about messaging in general and not specifically about group messaging that makes sense. When you have a flat SMS rate you don’t really put time into thinking what to use when you send out a message to a friend.
2 important things to note:
- Some apps are strong in emerging markets/APAC and therefore are not well represented here
- Apps that are very strong in one feature (i.e. voice/video calls), are not strong in other features they added later (i.e. messaging). I’m specifically referring to Viber yet numbers might be very different if survey included young people from APAC
Group Messaging
The thing that interested me most was group messaging. I wanted to know if it is only me who feels under attack by it.
I’m on many groups:
- 1 for each child (that makes 2) for parents of all kids in class to talk about things. Needless to say, a lot not really interesting messages are being exchanged in these groups. Still I must be on them as sometimes there are important things being shared
- Then I have the family groups, one for my side and one for my wife. I’m on both
- Then we move on to friends, I have 4 groups of different social activities, mainly bike riding and hiking. I must be on them as our activities are announced there
All in all, 8 groups, 5-6 of them are active on daily basis. And the survey says…
Based on the survey I’m not the only one who feels that group messaging creates an overload of messages.
And many have left groups due to this overload.
There is more information in the survey results. If you are interested in receiving the complete data use this link to subscribe. This will subscribe you to the blog but you can always unsubscribe if you wish to.
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