Will Facebook Maintain Its Popularity in 2020?

Studies report that fewer users are interested in Facebook as Instagram provides more features than ever. Instagram will overtake Facebook in the USA by 2020, and worldwide, in the following years. Instagram’s features are not the only reason Facebook started to lose popularity among its users. People prefer more encrypted and private messaging services like Messenger and WhatsApp. As communication is slowly shifting to private services people can confidently use, Facebook needs to upgrade the services it provides if it wants to maintain its popularity.

Why does Instagram overtake Facebook?

People prefer mobile-friendly apps, and Instagram is more mobile-friendly than Facebook. For many years, Instagram was a mobile-only app so it’s no surprise that it provides a better mobile experience. Facebook has made multiple advancements in this regard, but it cannot equal Instagram. Over 80% of social media content is consumed in mobile environments so Facebook loses due to a structural disadvantage.

Snapchat was the first platform to ever integrate stories, and Instagram took inspiration from its technology when it first incorporated the function. Now, even Facebook has stories, but its function is not as effective as Instagram’s, and people prefer the second platform when they want to publish one. Instagram stories are even more popular than Snapchat’s ones.

Facebook tried multiple times to integrate direct commerce into its features, but it has a modest success. But Instagram has no problem to master commerce, and people consider it a natural extension of the platform. The targeting algorithm is more sophisticated than the one of Facebook, and it better reaches people. And the experience will become even better because Instagram announced that they intend to integrate app-payments, so users can purchase products from the photo directly. If they include this feature and it will work, it will probably make Instagram one of the most powerful commerce tools available on the market.

Companies find challenging to gain organic reach through Facebook’s News Feed. But Instagram facilitates the brand/user coexistence and therefore companies choose this social media platform to promote their services. For many brands, it’s a pleasure to display their content on Instagram because it drives better engagements. Their Facebook posts on the other hand are the target of constant attacks.

Because Instagram used hashtags from the beginning it built a better discovery. Because the average post includes from 5 to 20 hashtags, users find easier to find the piece of content they are interested in. Because publishers have better chances their content to be discovered on the platform, they flooded it with hashtags and enriched the system.

Instagram is a more positive place than Facebook and this makes people turn to it and choose it instead of its bigger brother. No one says that Instagram doesn’t have its trolls and misanthropes, but in comparison with Facebook, most of the posts don’t receive backsplash.

Facebook will remain one of the most popular social media platforms even in 2020, but signs show that Instagram and private messaging services will gain more popularity.