Changes in social media over the past few months have led to the formation of a news media field.

Of course, this is nothing new, but now it’s possible to see that the group breakdown is forming different information streams, that often do not intersect.

It has already been said that since the beginning of the year Odnoklassniki has finally lost its top position in Armenia. The Revolution and Nikol Pashinyan’s live streams brought a large number of people from Odnoklassniki to Facebook.

If we look at the growth of Facebook’s audience in recent months, it can be seen that active users have increased by nearly one hundred thousand, which brought the monthly audience up to 1.3 million.

On the other hand, Facebook’s audience has not grown during the last three months, meanwhile Odnaklassniki continues to diminish. We can assume that there are several migration flows.

For example, during the last month, Pashinyan’s Facebook page grew to 20 thousand, which, can be assumed to be done mostly at the expense of immigration from Odnoklassniki. But Facebook’s audience doesn’t grow. Which is mainly conditioned by the fact that there is emigration as well as migration.

Since Odnoklassniki’s newbie group brings with it a new style of interaction, which does not please the “old-timer” Facebook users, they leave. You can add schoolchildren, who are already considered over-exposed to adult politics.  

The youth is leaving Facebook. This is not anything new, however the outflow is growing with time. The direction is mainly towards Instagram and YouTube.

Instagram’s audience has been stably growing nearly by 7-10%. The Armenian audience has already reached 650 thousand. In case of such a rate, Facebook will soon have serious competition in Armenia.

Most of the audience here is the youth: The number of people under the age of 42 is about 570 thousand. In addition, Instagram users are more open to foreign audiences. Here the number of young people with a large audience is much bigger than Facebook, where they have a harder time displaying themselves.  

The same is taking place on YouTube. Of course, the main producers of traffic are newsgroups and tv shows, especially after the revolution. However, youth vloggers are already serious competitors for major mass media, especially from the point of view of audience building and feedback.

It’s because of young vloggers that YouTube in Armenia is not only for videos and live streaming, but also a social network with all of its attributes.

Twitter of course continues to grow, but here the process of growing audiences is quite limited. “Pub-going,” anarchist youth, various types of professionals who are typically writing for an audience abroad and a huge number of automated accounts, that simply take Facebook posts and automatically turn them into Tweets (for example, the police Twitter account which is loved by all).

Twitter, in turn, is an area where people run away from crowded Facebook to.

LinkedIn continues to grow steadily, but not at a rate comparable to Instagram. Professionally motivated debates are slowly, slowly moving here. Even if a person has an active account both here and on Facebook, they are basically two different characters, since LinkedIn stays away from the personal. For many the unknown Snapchat takes up a special place. In Armenia, this is a very unique platform, which is used primarily only by schoolchildren and students. Adults are often not even aware of its existence.

But if we look at statistics then we will see that Snapchat is one of the most downloaded social media applications for Android in the last few years (according to Similarweb data).

The same is true with Apple applications in the Armenian market (in the photo and video section).

The general picture is that social groups are beginning to separate from each other and disperse into different apartments, being tired of widespread chaotic noise.

Samvel Martirosyan

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.