Last year, Facebook saw global users drop by around 1.4 million. This year, the social media platform, which remains hugely popular in developing countries, is forecast to report a 2.1 million plunge in numbers, while Snapchat can expect a 1.9 million increase.


While Snapchat has increased its users, an update that took place earlier this year, which changed settings and making it more complicated to use, led to many younger users moving to Instagram, while some even quit Snapchat altogether.


Instagram is also getting much more use compared to Snapchat. A total of 500 million of daily users use Instagram and fewer than half of those (around 200 million) use Snapchat. The Snapchat update was made to attract other types of users, but existing ones have reported disappointment with the update.


Facebook, however, still leads as the most used social media network in Portugal. Surprisingly, the amount of teenagers who have started using Instagram and Snapchat more, has not stopped Facebook from being the most popular social media platform in the country.


Repeated research also shows social media is thought of to be used mostly by 12 to 17 year olds and one argument for Facebook maintaining high numbers that dormant accounts are not deleted, nor are those which are used infrequently.


Another social media platform that is growing in popularity bigger is Twitter.


Louis Hall Maurício (15) from Portimão said in comments to The Portugal News this week that “Snapchat is my favourite social media platform as I also use it to contact friends. However, recently I’ve been using Twitter much more frequently as I find many humourous memes”. He did however say Twitter was set up differently to other mainstream platforms, making it harder for some teens to use.


Xenia Chudinova (15) from Lagos, says she thinks Snapchat is currently the best platform: “Snapchat is my favourite social media platform and my favourite way of contacting others, it’s also the platform I’ve started to use more of recently and probably the one I actually use the most.”


Tayla Larkin-Donnellan (15), also from Lagos, is also a Snapchat fan: “I use snapchat to talk to friends and it’s also my favourite social media platform, I still use Facebook, but not with the same frequency I used to, as Instagram was also created along with Snapchat.”


These views were substantiated in research released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center, which said teenagers have abandoned Facebook in favour of other social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.


Researchers found that just 51 percent of US individuals aged 13 to 17 say they use Facebook, down from 71 percent just three years ago.


According to the study, whose findings were published in the Gaurdian, Facebook use was “notably lower” than the percentage of teens who said they used YouTube (85 percent), Instagram (72 percent) or Snapchat (69 percent). In the 2015 study, just 52 percent of teens said they used Instagram, while 41 percent said they used Snapchat.