Facebook and Instagram were less popular in Belgium last year than in 2020. LinkedIn and Messenger, on the other hand, saw their user numbers increase slightly. This is evident from figures from analysis agency NapoleonCat. “Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the monopoly of Meta, the former Facebook parent company,” warns Professor Lieven De Marez.
Where Facebook and especially Instagram saw their figures peak in the first corona year 2020, the situation turned out to be different last year. Instagram lost almost half a million users in Belgium (-10.45 percent) and fell to 4,275,000 accounts last year.
The loss at Facebook is smaller (-1.69 percent) and fell from 8,420,000 users at the end of 2020 to 8,277,300 in December 2021. This makes it the most popular social media channel in Belgium. At the moment, about seven in ten Belgians have a Facebook profile.
The number of Belgians using Messenger – Facebook’s chat app – rose slightly (+0.98 percent) from 6,186,000 to 6,246,500 users, which is roughly half of the Belgian population. The professional network LinkedIn also continued its growth in recent years with 240,000 additional accounts (+5.91 percent).
TikTok
“We are still very dependent on social media, especially due to the corona crisis, but we are looking at this dependence a little more critically,” explains social media researcher De Marez. That may have led to the lower numbers. In addition, there is a strong shift to the popular video app TikTok.
TikTok is a worthy competitor and has contributed to the gradual capping of Instagram as the most important app in visual culture. Meta tries again to ensure that dominance by, for example, also offering ‘reels’ (short videos that appear on TikTok) on Instagram.
Still, De Marez warns that we should not dramatize these results and that the monopoly of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta remains significant. “If you decide to stop using Instagram, for example, you will not immediately leave Meta,” says De Marez. In addition to Facebook and Instagram, the company also has Messenger and LinkedIn.
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