WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, Messenger, Viber, Signal, Line – you name it, there are now a plethora of messaging apps that have reached a critical mass of users around the world. In the U.S. and Europe, these messaging apps are a fact of life for many businesses, especially those in financial services, healthcare, and government sector.
According to a report from Radicati Group, the business use of IM is currently growing at a much faster pace than the use of IM by consumers. This is due to the fact that IM use in the workplace can be tightly monitored and controlled by IT and users are expected to use it much in the same way they use email.
In a report from eMarketer, it is also noted that text-based messaging is still the most widely used function, but other types of messages such as voice chats and video calling are gaining traction among U.S. and European chat apps users as well.
Read on as we detail in this infographic the state of instant messaging apps in US and in Europe.
US
A recent report from eMarketer revealed that the number of US mobile messaging app users will reach 149.8 million in 2018, with that figure growing to 171.3 million by 2022.
According to Statista, Facebook Messenger is the most popular mobile messaging app in the country, with 110.95 million monthly active users as of July 2018. Snapchat ranked second with 52.09 million users, and WhatsApp at third with 20.94 million active U.S. users.
Other popular mobile messaging apps in the country include Google Hangouts, Messenger by Google, GroupMe, Discord, Kik, Skype, Line, and Telegram.
While WhatsApp is not the most popular messaging app in the country, it is fast gaining traction among US mobile users. According to Statista, WhatsApp users in the US are expected to grow from 16.2 million in 2015 to 25.6 million in 2021.
Europe
According to eMarketer, 64.1% of mobile phone internet users in Western Europe use mobile messaging apps in 2017.
While there is no definitive source that shows the total number of users of different chat apps, a recent SimilarWeb report show that WhatsApp is the leading mobile messaging app in European countries including:
- United Kingdom
- Netherlands
- Italy
- Germany
- Austria
- Switzerland
- Spain
- Russia
- Latvia
On other European countries, Facebook Messenger is considered the primary communication tool among users in:
- France
- Belgium
- Norway
- Sweden
- Ireland
- Portugal
- Poland
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Greece
- Albania
- Romania
- Bulgaria
- Slovenia
- Hungary
- Slovakia
- Lithuania
- Estonia
On countries Belarus, Ukraine, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Viber registered as the most popular chat app.
*These countries, however, have WhatsApp as the 2nd most popular messaging app, according to SimilarWeb.
Conclusion
As what we can infer from these statistics, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are dominating the mobile messaging app market both in US and in Europe. But regardless if your business is in U.S. and Europe, the mobile messaging app that you use in the workplace can significantly impact your employees’ productivity, internal communication, and most importantly, your compliance with various text message archiving and voice call recording regulations.
This is even more critical for companies that allow their employees to use WhatsApp, since this platform is known to be using end-to-end encryption to protect the messages, which makes it almost impossible to monitor and supervise.
Fortunately, there is now a solution to address this problem. TeleMessage’s WhatsApp Archiver is a unique enterprise messaging platform tailor-made to solve WhatsApp compliance and regulation issues by allowing financial firms to capture and archive WhatsApp messages. This platform works exactly like the standard WhatsApp application, ensuring that employees will still be able to send work-related communications easily and quickly and that you remain compliant with various WhatsApp regulations as well.
The benefits of using WhatsApp Archiver in your business include:
- Archive all WhatsApp communications
- Use WhatsApp to communicate with customers, employees, and stakeholders
- Search, track and retrieve WhatsApp messages in the corporate archive
- Deposit WhatsApp messages with any email archiving vendor
- Full administration and reporting
The TeleMessage WhatsApp Archiver is the latest addition to our mobile archiving products that securely capture content from mobile carriers and mobile devices for a variety of ownership models (BYOD, CYOD, and employer-issued). With our multiple archiving methods, you can always find the right tools or blend for your requirements:
TeleMessage offers cross-carrier and international mobile text and calls archiving for corporate and BYOD phones. Contact us today to try our mobile archiving products.
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