2016 is becoming the start of a new phase in the development of social media in Armenia. The Russian social networking site (SNS) Odnoklassniki is gradually moving to Plan B, Facebook’s growth is slowing, and new platforms are coming to the fore.

The stats for Odnoklassniki show that visits from Armenia are declining week after week. In the last six months, the decline was about 25% (see graph below, which is according to Liveinternet.ru).

On the other hand, the number of active users on Facebook per month has reached one million. The daily audience reaches 650 thousand. But in the last three months, the growth was only about 5%.

Instagram, on the other hand, is growing rapidly. The number of daily users on this platform is 110 thousand, while the monthly audience is 200 thousand. Here, the age distribution is more definite: almost all users are under 45. According to SimilarWeb, Instagram is already at the 11th place in the ranking of most visited websites in Armenia.

When it comes to Twitter, it’s still difficult to talk about exact numbers, since the microblogging site’s advertising platform is unable to offer exact numbers. But the audience can be estimated at around 15 to 20 thousand users, but a fairly large percentage of their posts are automated tweets from websites or Facebook.

But people in Armenia, particularly young people, have become more active on Twitter in the last year. In addition, according to Twitter’s advertising stats, women, it seems, are more active than men: there are almost twice as many women as men using Twitter. This division by gender is noticed also on Instagram.

The hardest is evaluating Russian social networking site VKontakte. On one hand, according to the site, more than one million users from Armenia are registered on the site,and  in terms of visits, the SNS is in the top 10. On the other hand, the majority of visitors use VKontakte not as a social networking site, but as a platform to listen to music and watch movies.

Samvel Martirosyan