Facebook audience increases slow, while Twitter will see a double-digit rise this year
Toronto, ON (Jan. 22, 2015) – Canada’s social network user population is reaching a saturation point, with just under 20 million people in the country expected to access social networks at least monthly this year, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast. Just under seven in 10 internet users in the country, or 56.7% of the total population, will use social networks this year. By 2018, the end of our forecast period, those penetration rates will rise slightly to 70.6% and 59.9%, respectively.
These penetration rates put Canada right in line with the US, where 55.9% of the population will use social networks this year.
The vast majority of social network users in Canada are on Facebook. Here again, the population is becoming fairly stagnant, with around 93% of social network users in the country expected to use Facebook throughout our forecast period. That translates to just over half the population using the social network monthly.
Twitter usage rates tell a different tale. Growth for the Twitter audience in Canada is still in the double digits—though 2015 will be the last year of it. Just over a third of social network users in Canada will use Twitter this year. By the end of our forecast period, the microblogging service will still only be used by under a quarter of Canada’s total population, or 8.5 million people.
Still, Twitter is more popular in Canada than in the US, where just 16.4% of the population, or 20.4% of internet users, are expected to use the social network this year.
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SOURCE: eMarketer