Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, with around 59.9% of the world's population, or 4.8 billion people, on social media worldwide. However, with attention spans shrinking, people typically use a mix of around six to seven social media networks and spend an average of two hours 24 minutes on them.

However, the amount of time users spend on these social media apps can vary dramatically, which can affect these tech giants. For example, a tweet by American media personality Kylie Jenner in 2018 questioning whether anyone was still using Snapchat resulted in around US$1bil being wiped off the company's valuation.

Similarly, Meta launched its answer to the Twitter (then X) conundrum in July with the launch of its Threads app, aimed at becoming a "public square for communities". While Meta's X rival was the talk of the town in its early days, becoming the only service to hit 100 million users in just five days, the debutant's dream run was soon over, with 80% of its daily active users declining by August, according to data from TRG Datacentres.

To understand this conundrum, US-based TRG Datacentres took the nine most popular social media networks in the world and analysed how many times the phrase 'how to delete (my) ___ account' was searched in the last 12 months to identify the social media companies that had lost favour with users.

According to data from TRG Datacentres, Instagram was the most sought-after social media app to be deleted, with over one million searches for 'how to delete (my) instagram account' per month in 2023.

The authors of the latest study had a stark warning for Instagram, noting, "Despite this, the app still boasts two billion users worldwide. However, if a million people continue to seek deletion of their accounts every month, the 'Instagrammable' bubble could burst, potentially altering its landscape within a year."

Snapchat, the favourite social media app among Gen-Z, was second on the list with around 130,000 people looking to delete their Snapchat account.

 - TNS