Tuesdata: How BeReal and TikTok are smashing Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat (and WeAre8 is yet to make a dent)

Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly look into the most interesting data from the media and marketing industry.

Today’s dataset is fascinating - quarterly downloads of social media apps here in Australia. The numbers - which have been provided to Unmade by Sensor Tower - suggest some intriguing trends:

• Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat are all in radical decline - more so than the market has realised until now;

• TikTok, which was top download for the previous five quarters in a row, has been overtaken;

• Photo sharing app BeReal has seen explosive growth;

• UK-Aussie startup WeAre8 is struggling to get off the ground

Any marketer or agency executive who makes decisions around social media spend would be well advised to look at this new data.

The content of the full post is available only to Unmade’s paying members. Today is a good day to sign up. Not only can you see the specific download numbers in this edition, you’ll also gain access to our Tuesdata archive.

Unmade’s paying members also get two free tickets to our Marketing In 2023 event in Melbourne, in a fortnight’s time. The discount code appears at the end of this email, beneath the paywall.

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How new kid BeReal is rocketing while WeAre8… isn’t

In today’s edition of Tuesdata, we examine a dataset prepared for Unmade by Sensor Tower.

Sensor Tower is a media intelligence platform which tracks app downloads via both Google Play and the Apple App Store. Because neither Google or Apple share this data publicly, Sensor Tower takes a panel-based approach. Effectively, that means the data is Sensor Tower’s best guess based on the behaviour of the consumers in its panel, which it says is the biggest of its type globally.

The numbers shown are based around individual Apple IDs and Google Play accounts, and automatically exclude app updates, or re-downloads onto new devices with the same ID.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the chart shows new downloads for that quarter, so it is not a measure of overall usage - rather, speed of adoption.

First we’ll show all the services together on one chart, then break some of them out. The chart shows almost four years of Sensor Towerdata, starting at the beginning of 2019 and going through to the third quarter of 2022, which ended just yesterday.