The influence of social networking sites (SNSs) on Armenia is growing. 

Though the influence of all SNSs is increasing, the main platform for news and the media industry remains Facebook. 

Of course, YouTube also has a large role. But it’s difficult to say which users not only passively view, but also upload videos or at least leave comments. That is, it’s hard to evaluate those who use this platform as a social network. In any case, according to Similarweb, YouTube is the third most visited site in Armenia, while according to Alexa, it’s the fourth.

In terms of Twitter, everything is clear as mud. It’s impossible to know the precise number of users on this platform because the numbers aren’t made public. On the other hand, judging from the approximate audience of the most active users, we can conclude that the number of Twitter users in Armenia fluctuates between 10 to 20 thousand. 

It’s interesting to observe the figures from Armenia regarding the social networking service Tsu. The service experienced explosive growth in Armenia [AM]. Viewing Tsu as an interesting marketing platform, I contacted their advertising department about a week after the excitement over the new site. It turned out that the number of users has reached 7,000 and continues to grow, which is unprecedented for a period of a week.

Let me cite an example. Though a large number of articles from the Armenian press are shared on Tsu, analytics from two major Armenian online news media that have a large audience show that in 10 days, one of the news outlets had 4, while the other had 10 visitors to their sites from Tsu.co, which is a small number compared to the vigorous activity on that social network. 

As for the two SNS giants, Facebook and Odnoklassniki, there are no qualitative changes. Facebook continues to be the main news and information platform in Armenia. Currently, there are about 800,000 active users on Facebook (some of which are fake accounts of course, but this number is not large — the worldwide average is 5–7%). 

The most visited SNS, as always, remains Odnoklassniki. The number of active visitors to this SNS in Armenia has reached 1 million (note, not the number of users but visitors).

At one point it seemed that Facebook would catch up to this SNS, but the number of Odnoklassniki users in Armenia again began to grow rapidly. But online news outlets have not yet been able to make use of this potential, investing nearly all their advertising and marketing efforts into Facebook. 

Samvel Martirosyan

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