QSR Magazine: Why Facebook Is Still the Best Marketing Channel

If Pokémon Go has taught marketers anything, it’s that a new platform capable of explosive growth is always around the corner. Photo app Snapchat might not have rocketed onto the scene like the augmented-reality game, but it has found purchase as a scrappy rival to more established social media platforms.

In fact, the Internet is littered with news stories, op-eds, and blog posts decreeing the obsolescence of Facebook and the ascension of Snapchat.

But not so fast, says John Dick, CEO of CivicScience, which recently conducted a study comparing the two social media companies. The resulting data flies in the face of the anecdotes and assumptions.

“Achieving scale is not an easy thing to do … that’s not to say [Facebook] is protected for infinity; we’ve certainly seen what have happened to other so-called kings of the hill like AOL or Yahoo! say 15–20 years ago,” Dick says. “Snapchat or something like Snapchat will continue to appeal to the youngest sector just because it’s not where everyone else is.”

But Facebook has hedged its bets by establishing a popular network across age and socioeconomic demographics, Dick adds. When polling consumers younger than 35, Civicscience found that 34 percent of Snapchat users ate at quick serves one or more times a week. This number pales in comparison with the 65 percent of Facebook users who will visit a quick serve once or more each week.

Ultimately Facebook is much more difficult to dethrone just because of its sheer size (1.65 billion) compared with Snapchat, which just passed the 100 million user mark.