IS FACEBOOK LOSING THE CUSTOMERS ATTENTION?

Fresh insights into Australia’s social media usage suggest TikTok is carving away at Facebook’s stranglehold on the nation’s attention span, drawing massive ad spending and e-commerce potential to the short video app.

In its Digital 2022 Australia report, released Wednesday, social media marketing firm Hootsuite and creative agency We Are Social build on data which revealed Australians as some of the largest e-commerce spenders in the world.

The average Australian social media user spent one hour and 57 minutes on social media every day in 2021, the report said. That’s 11 minutes more than they did in 2020.

While the report does not speculate on the reasons for that uptick, it does highlight TikTok’s massive rise in prominence.

It was the third-most downloaded app in Australia in 2021, the report says, trailing only the official Service NSW and Service VIC apps used for QR code check-ins and COVID-19 vaccine certificates.

With that reach comes the potential to reach more consumers. Hootsuite and We Are Social state TikTok ads targeted at Australians over the age of 18 now have the potential to reach around 7.38 million people, a figure which increased by more than 500,000 people over the December quarter alone.

While Facebook remains Australia’s most-used social media platform, the data shows users spent an average of 17.6 hours on it per month — 3% less than they did the year prior.

It could be a concerning data point for a company whose market cap fell already by billions of dollars earlier this month, thanks to Facebook reporting its first-ever quarterly decline in daily users.

By comparison, TikTok users spent an average of 23.4 hours per month on the app, up an astonishing 40% from 2020.

Some $AU3.64 billion was funnelled into Australian social media advertising through 2021, a $AU547 million uptick on the year prior, suggesting newer platforms like TikTok set to benefit from marketers chasing the Gen Z dollar.

It’s not all bad news for the company now called Meta, however. Instagram, the stalwart image-sharing app, tallied a total potential ad reach of 12.75 million Australians in 2021. That’s 1.8 million higher than it was in 2020.

The data also gives shape to January’s revelation that the average Australian spent $2,776 via e-commerce in 2021.

Australians spent some $53.3 billion on online consumer goods through the year, up some $11.1 billion from the year prior.

That comports with spending data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Australia’s big banks, which tallied significant spikes in online spending through the successive COVID-19 lockdowns of 2021.

Fashion spending made the biggest individual contribution to that tally, with Australian consumers purchasing some $13.4 billion in clothing and shoes through the year.

 

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tiktok-facebook-social-media-report-attention-advertising