Mobile Me & You — Instant Messaging Apps: General Insights (Part 9)
We live in a society where mobile phones have won a permanent place in our lives. Nowadays, they seem to have become a necessity for most people and especially for Millennials. Thus, it has been a very interesting task for us to explore the “relationship” that young people have with their mobile phones, in the framework of New Consuming Trends course of Panteion University, taught by our professor Mrs Betty Tsakarestou. During this course our team participated on a research project called Mobile Me and You concerning mobile collaborative consumption and sharing economy that are now on the rise. My team specifically chose to focus our part of the research on the use of instant messaging apps.
Our interviewees are Millennials who are still in college, but some of them work at the same time. For almost everyone, their mobile phone is considered vital and if someone took it away from them, they would be scared and angry. When they thought more about it, they admitted that it would probably be a positive thing, because they would appreciate other things in life and realise that mobile phones aren’t that vital after all. They use their phones about 4–5 hours per day and most of them are grabbing it the moment they wake up. They also use it for college/work and favor it over other devices.
They admit that their mobile makes them feel connected with a lot of friends and family, especially if they are abroad and it gives them the opportunity to catch up with everyone’s news, anytime. On the other hand, it makes them feel disconnected from the real world, especially if they spend much time on it. When they are with their friends, they all seem to try not to use their phones, but they also admit that if there’s something they need to check or show to the others, they will instantly grab it.
We did not only interview them about their phone usage, but we also wanted to investigate how they live in a sharing economy environment and how they react to it.
The definition of sharing economy according to“Sharing Economy Business Toolbox” is: “what is mine is yours for a fee” (e.g. flats, cars, transportation) and its business model has some features. These features are:
-Access instead of ownership, rather than buying and asset, the seek rents it from someone else.
-A platform brings together owners and seekers and facilitates all processes between them.
-The business/platform itself does not possess any of the assets on offer: Airbnb does not own a single room, Zipcar not a single car.”
The Millennials we interviewed, reacted positively on a sharing economy environment, as we asked them questions about Airbnb/car sharing and everyone said that they are familiar with this kind of platforms. In terms of trusting strangers, they are a bit hesitant, but they pointed, especially for Airbnb, that it is an app that everyone is uses, so you “wish” that something won’t happen to you and try to see the practical part of the app. It also has ratings and profiles, so if someone isn’t trustable, he would have bad ratings, so they wouldn’t choose him.
But it’s not only that, Millennials are actually driving the sharing economy nowadays; as studies from the “Forrester” show, in the U.S. they are the biggest population group and they are using their smartphones to share everything. “They are constantly looking to share themselves, their belongings and their lives with the world. So they have transformed technology in more areas than social media (transportation, music, movies), but sharing economy, still has a plenty room to grow. Right now it’s giving better customer experience for many Millennials, who value experiences more than material goods, but they also are beginning to live more virtually than ever before” (source: Millennials-How to do well in a sharing economy).
As the “Forrester” continues: All social media platforms are giving them the idea of success solely based on the number of friends, likes and follows one has. This makes incredibly important for a Millennial to share their lives in order to entertain friends, show off and moreover, get recognition for what they are doing. Our interviewees choose to share pictures, videos and some thoughts on social media, except from two of them that are very hesitant about it and want to share everything only in a very small group of people.
Nowadays, surveys show, Millennials prefer to have a more “private” life in social media. This is something that our interviewees also claimed and most of them aren’t really into social media anymore, but more into Instant Messaging Apps. Some of them don’t even have a profile on Facebook and the ones who do, don’t use it as much as some years ago. They prefer Instant Messaging Apps instead, because they feel more comfortable sharing what they want in a personal conversation, or in a group that they chose to make.
Concerning Instant Messaging Apps, is the news sharing that happens on them? The researcher AntonisKalogeropoulos, made a really good research about this topic with the title “The Rise of Messaging Apps for News”. In his article he points out that “the use of Facebook for news has been falling since 2016 and Instant Messaging Apps are rising instead (especially WhatsApp). On WhatsApp it’s more likely to take part in a private discussion about news or to take part in a group set up specifically to discuss a news topic. Focus groups said they have groups set up for friends , family or work and that they can chat and post articles about all sorts of topics, including news more freely”.“In Latin America and Europe, WhatsApp is more widespread, but in some other European countries (like Greece), Messenger is the dominant messaging app and Viber is also a vary widespread apps in Balkans”.
All of our interviewees use WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger often create group chats on them. When they were asked about them, they didn’t say anything about news sharing. The group chats they have with their friends are used to arrange appointments (might be a party or a meeting), to communicate about group projects (for university), or just to share funny content like memes and satirical videos. Moreover, the group chats they have with their families is because most of them live far away from them and they want to stay in touch.
Among our interviewees, only Raissa from Brazil and Emma from Spain claimed to have read and shared news through social media and Instant Messaging Apps. Raissa prefers Facebook and Messenger and the time we interviewed her, Brazil was on election period and she really wanted to be informed all the time about the developments. Emma is a journalist, thus it’s vital for her to read the news, but she actually prefers Twitter and Instagram for it. She claimed that it’s very important for a journalist to be on these platforms and share news content, because they can be hired for a job via their profile.
WhatsApp is indeed the most popular Instant Messaging App, not only among our interviewees, but also worldwide. As William Porter writes in his article “Instant messaging Apps user statistics 2018” and the percentages he got from “Statista”, the top 3 popular messaging apps are 1)WhatsApp, 2)Facebook Messenger and 3)WeChat, based on the number of active users. Instant Messaging Apps have around 2 billion users and 10,8% user growth in 2018. This fact shows that over half of the world’s population is active online and that Instant Messaging Apps are changing the world’s communication landscape.
Another survey claims, that “Instant Messaging Apps are bigger than social networks, so users are beginning to use chatting apps to connect with brands and shop for products and services”. . In the article, it is claimed that “the goal for Messenger is to be a platform where people can build and integrate apps. […] It also aims to be a place for individuals to connect with brands. […] WhatsApp’s user onboarding flow is very conventional, taking just the appropriate steps to guide users to the value it has to offer. […] Viber has an impressive user base that stands out over 800 million users.”“If a large enough network would be created, it would be hard for users to leave it, especially if all of their friends are using it. […] User onboarding pratices are a highly idiosyncratic function of who the user is-theis motivations and pains-and the product’s ability to satisfy that new user’s desire.”
That’s a very interesting point of view regarding the use of Instant Messaging Apps. Many of our interviewees admitted that they prefer online shopping through their mobile, but haven’t said anything in particular about Instant Messaging Apps, so it could be an interesting topic to examine on another level of our Mobile Me and You research.
The last survey, which we compared and joined our general insights with, is an article about using Instant Messaging Apps for higher education marketing. In this article it is claimed that “Instant Messaging Apps are:
-more intimate and private messaging
-giving the users to be constantly connected and cost-effective
-successful through instant notifications
-not demanding for a lot of content
-having group chats.
As I have already mentioned, all of our interviewees participate on group chats, especially with their university-friends. Thus, it’s seems only natural that the article proposes to the universities to “leverage this by connecting students in specific course, lectures or study groups, to keep them instantly informed of events and ways their university experience could be improved”. If this suggestionwas actually implemented, everything would be changed in academic events and the way students are work on their university projects.
In conclusion, we live in a sharing economy environment, were Millennials are taking the lead, by constantly sharing content and using sharing. Social media are still a big part of our lives, but Instant Messaging Apps have gained more trust among users and they can’t stop rising worldwide. They can be used for news, for brand engaging, even for academic reasons and that’s because they are vital for Millennials’ everyday lives.
You can watch the video with our final insights here.
This article is only one of the few that we conducted for this project. If you found itinteresting you can continue your reading on the other articles of myself or the ones of my teammates Athena Styllou and elena kouki on the links below or visit our website https://mobileimapps.wixsite.com/website.
All the sources that I used to write this article are also linked below.
Sources:
