Competition Leaves Snapchat and Twitter Behind

While Twitter has a loyal and active community of users, the microblogging service is struggling to attract new people and get to the next level in terms of mainstream appeal. After explosive growth in the first years of its existence, Twitter’s growth slowed down significantly once the company had reached 300 million users. Since hitting 302 million monthly active users in Q1 2015, Twitter added just 33 million users in more than three years.

A similar trend appears to be emerging for Snapchat, which is still immensely popular among teenagers, but struggles to break through to the masses. Over the past 12 months, Snapchat added just 15 million daily active users, bringing its total to 188 million.

As the following chart illustrates, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook each gained more users in the past year than Snapchat has in total. While Facebook now owns three separate platforms with more than a billion users (four if you include Messenger), Twitter and Snapchat fall further and further behind.