With a countrywide lockdown in place to check the spread of COVID-19, social media platforms such as Twitter, TikTok and ShareChat have seen a significant spike in daily active users or DAUs in India for February and March.
Twitter saw a 30% rise in daily users in the last two months, according to a report by data intelligence and management platform Kalagato. Twitter was followed by Live.me, TikTok and ShareChat, which saw 25%, 11% and 10% spike respectively in daily active users on their platforms.
However, Facebook and Instagram, which had high DAUs, saw no change in daily users during the period.
“Twitter’s spike in usage is interesting since many people use it as a central source of news. Possibly due to the lack of availability and thinning nature of newspapers – people are increasingly looking online to get the latest updates”, said Aman Kumar, the chief business officer of Kalagato.
The report also measured total session time and open rate by users of social media platforms during the two month period.
In terms of the percentage change in total time spent on social media platforms, Live.me saw a huge spike of 315%, from 13.6 minutes in Feb to 56.4 minutes in March, added the report.
It was followed by Bigo, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Though, Facebook and TikTok had highest total session time on their platforms.
In terms of change in the number of times users of a platform open it on a given day, Live.me and Instagram witnessed a significant rise.
Live.me saw 88% change in open rate with users opening the app 12 times in a day in March from 6.3 times in Feb whereas Instagram’s users opened the app 19 times in March, a hike of 59% from its opening rate in Feb.
Facebook and TikTok had the highest open rate with their users opening the apps 21 and 13 times respectively on a day in March.
