Social Media User Traffic Raised 40 Percent During The Corona Pandemic

Facebook illustration (unsplash)

JAKARTA - When many countries have locked down or quarantined their areas due to the spread of COVID-19. People can no longer do activities outside the home, as a result, only social media can be used to keep interacting with one another.

Launching Tech Crunch, the Kantar research institute revealed the many activities of social media users during their activities at home. At least there has been an increase of more than 25,000 new users of the WhatsApp instant messaging application in recent weeks.

For information, the survey was conducted on March 14 to 24. During that time, this Facebook subsidiary as a whole experienced an increase in WhatApp traffic by 40 percent and the highest traffic occurred in Spain.

Globally, the increase in traffic using WhatsApp has jumped to 51 percent in a number of countries that have begun implementing lockdown policies. In a Facebook newsroom post, his party promised to improve the quality of the network for access to social media in several countries affected by the coronavirus.

Especially nowadays, many Facebook users use the Messenger service to send voice and video messages. The same thing happened to Instagram during the last two weeks which experienced an increase in traffic.

In Klear's report, there were about 6.1 times the story was uploaded in one day by Instagram users. Even new hashtags to increase the variety of activities from Instagram uploads have also increased by 21 percent.

"The growth in use during the COVID-19 outbreak is unprecedented across the industry, and we are experiencing new records in use almost every day," quoted VOI of the Klear report.

This social media platform, which is under Facebook, is also the only alternative for netizens to keep interacting with one another. On the other hand, Facebook's business sector was forced to lose for an indefinite period.

"We are not monetizing many services where we are seeing increased engagement, and we have seen our advertising business weaken in countries that are taking aggressive action to reduce the spread of COVID-19," the blue logo platform said.

An update on the work we're doing with health authorities to connect people with accurate information and limit the spread of misinformation on COVID-19: https://t.co/nqTF751bOU pic.twitter.com/QtGIjidO0Z

- Facebook (@Facebook) March 25, 2020

In addition, Facebook also faces major challenges in maintaining the stability of traffic spikes, when many of its employees have to work from home. Moreover, there are still a lot of hoaxes and disinformation that are still circulating on the platform.

In order for this traffic spike not to burden internet usage, Facebook was forced to reduce the quality of the videos it uploads to its platform. This had to be done to reduce bandwidth usage and soaring internet network tension in many countries.

WhatsApp also did the same thing by cutting the video duration on its Status feature to 15 seconds after the previous 30 seconds. Likewise with Instagram which lowers the quality of videos that can be played by its users.