The number of social network users in Canada continues to climb, as a wider variety of platforms become available that can satisfy user appetites for information, entertainment, and personal expression.

Two years into the initiative, the effort remains a work in progress as it continues to lack basic functions, including the ability to display products in different colors and sizes if they aren’t sold directly through Facebook or Instagram, and limits on where merchants can ship items. Still, the massive user bases of Meta’s social networks are seen as an ecommerce advantage.

Meta juggles its Facebook present and metaverse future: The social network gains users, but recent losses could mean less money for metaverse R&D, giving VR platform competitors an opening.

Meta released its Q1 2022 earnings, revealing the company's slowest revenue growth since going public, for a total of $27.91 billion. Daily active users bounced back by 30 million users to 1.96 billion, following the platform’s first-ever drop in Q4 2021.

Once the domain of gamers and young social media users, AR and VR are entering the mainstream. This year, more than a quarter of the US population will use AR and nearly a fifth will use VR. As device-makers improve VR headsets and AR spreads to new use cases, the number of AR and VR users will continue to grow over the next four years, with AR outpacing VR.

More people in our survey bought on Facebook than on Instagram, but Instagram has stronger overall trust among buyers than Facebook does. For example, 63% of Instagram buyers said they felt safe participating on Instagram, versus 50% of Facebook buyers who felt that way about Facebook.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter’s problems attracting young users persist. Only 31% of respondents said they use Facebook at least once per month. We expect Facebook to lose 1.7 million teen users between 2020 and 2025, leaving it with 8 million. Twitter will lose 200,000 teens in the same period, leaving it with 5.2 million.

As platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok ramp up their social commerce capabilities, they have become a go-to spot for consumers to seek out product information, compare prices, and read reviews from other customers.

Instagram shows more promise for AR in shopping. It makes sense; its user base is younger than Facebook’s, and it has made heavy investments into its overall commerce offerings. Instagram first started testing AR try-on in 2019 in Checkout, which allows users to make purchases directly in the app. Even so, AR is not yet central to the shopping experience on Instagram like it is on Snapchat.

One of TikTok’s biggest advantages over Instagram is its strength in discovery, giving it a leg up in viral commerce as well. Instagram has already started experimenting with ways to better surface content and products to users; in August, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said the platform would revamp its search tab to display photos, videos, and relevant hashtags (sound familiar?)

Still, advertisers can evaluate and refine how or when they target ads to female users on social platforms. Ad Experience. Respondents were considerably less likely to perceive ads on Instagram as annoying versus those on Facebook. Just 21% of Instagram users agreed or strongly agreed that ads are annoying on Instagram, versus 33% of users who said Facebook.

In 2020, Instagram’s total number of monthly users will hit 1.00 billion for the first time, thanks to a worldwide user growth rate more than double what we had predicted before the pandemic.