Let's face it, we're over Facebook

Users with less time, coupled with an influx of advertising on Facebook has led to thousands of Australians abandoning the site, say experts. Source: AFP

• Facebook user numbers appear to drop
• Fatigue has set in, say social media experts
• 'Too many ads' on Facebook a turn-off

AUSTRALIANS are beginning to suffer from "Facebook fatigue" as new data shows almost 400,000 users have drifted away from the social network since December.

Figures collated from Facebook's publicly accessible ad tools, used by marketers and developers to determine audience reach, show the network's monthly active Australian users fell from about 11.8 million in December to just over 11.5 million in the past week.

The data collected by social media monitoring firm Social Bakers shows about 115,000 less people are logging on to Facebook each month since the new year, with the network losing about 390,000 active users overall.

A spokesperson for Facebook Australia  disputed the figures but refused to give any official user numbers, saying only that the network had 12 million monthly active Australian users at the end of 2012.

The spokesperson said numbers provided by Facebook's own ad tools system - which earlier this week cited its Australian user base as just over 11.5 million - were only an "estimate".

Social media marketing expert at the Queensland University of Technology Business School, Professor Larry Neale, said there had also been a decline in Facebook users in North America and Europe, as "Facebook fatigue" sweeps the globe.

"When Facebook was starting up they got a lot of people on and it was very novel, but the novelty has worn off a little bit, so now people are scaling back use," he said.

"How long people spend on there now has plateaued. There is that element of fatigue."

Prof Neale said the decline could also be attributed to Facebook members of three or more years drifting away from the network as they discover they no longer have time for it.

"Maybe when they started on Facebook they were in university but now they're in the workforce and they don't have the time to spend on it anymore, or they don't think it's the right way to be spending that time," he said.

Adelaide social media consultant Michelle Prak said while more than half the population now owns a Facebook account, the network's ban on members under 13 coupled with older people's general lack of interest in it means it may have reached a stalemate in Australia, with no real potential to grow user numbers any further.

Ms Prak said boredom, a desire to try new technologies and frustration with Facebook's ever increasing use of advertising were helping to drive users away from the network.

"'It may indeed be that some Australians are over Facebook and looking for more adventurous tools to use like Foursquare and Reddit and

"The increasing use of advertising can't be helping. Facebook is on dangerous ground there, when we want to quickly see what our friends are doing but we're served up an ad for online gaming instead, it's extremely frustrating."

QUT social media researcher Dr Christine Satchell said the proliferation of more "open" social media channels, such as link sharing site Reddit, were contributing to users' migration away from Facebook.

"One of the problems with Facebook is you can get very homogenised opinions and views being expressed because you only like certain things and talk to the same people, so you get a very closed view," she said.

"I think now we're seeing new forms of social media emerge which are not as closed off, they're more open to a whole new range of ideas and the discovery of new concepts ... and with that will probably come less use of Facebook."

Communications manager Anika Johnstone, 34, of  Adelaide was an avid user of Facebook for six years until "Facebook fatigue" drove her away from the network in late 2012.

She now rarely logs in, only using it to keep in touch with friends and family overseas, and is considering deleting her account altogether.

"I've gone from using it maybe a couple of times a day to maybe checking in once every 10 days," she said.

"All the advertising just turned me away from it, it felt like spam. The interactions with people became boring, it was always the same old stuff - pictures of babies and pictures of food - that got a bit old."

Facebook fatigue isn't a new phenomenon. In 2011, millions of users in the US and Europe began deactivating their accounts and there were predictions the same would happen in Australia.

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