Greek Viber users made 1 billion calls in 2021, revealed Rakuten Viber on Thursday, the company behind the popular call and text messaging app.
In Greece, over 90% of smartphones have installed the app, making it the top chat application in the country.
Greeks surpassed a figure of 90 million hours in talk time over the last 12 months, and they also sent 700 text messages per second using the popular cross-platform app. This translates to a 20% rise in call time, and a 15% rise in the number of sent text messages. The largest volume of calls and messages were over popular holidays like New Year's Day and St. Valentine's Day.
These figures concern a casual use of the app by regular users, but the company pointed out that business Viber accounts also increased in the previous year by 79% in Greece (55% worldwide). Business messages sent in Greece in total went up by 82%, a figure that includes customer support messages (36% up), promotional messages with offers and discounts (30% up), and a staggering 193% rise in the number of messages relating to order confirmations, shipment tracking and appointment reminders.
Advertisement impressions in Greece (the number of times a user sees an ad on Viber even indirectly) in 2021 went up by 16% (70% globally), with sectors registering a 90% rise in health and wellness, a 56% rise in energy-related ad content, and a 51% rise in transport-related content.
The application also saw a significant increase in new categories of advertising such as recruitment and local businesses, which reflects the pandemic's influence of the labor market, Rakuten pointed out. More than 8,500 companies worldwide rely on Viber to communicate with their customers, it highlighted. Besides mobiles, the app is also available to all desktop and mobile operating systems.
"The Covid-19 pandemic continued to change people's daily lives in 2021, and how society faced this new reality ," said Atanas Raykov, Senior Director EMENA of Rakuten Viber, adding that "I am glad how both users and businesses have recognized Viber as the main way to connect during these difficult times."
In 2021, Viber celebrated its 11th anniversary and crossed the threshold of 1 billion installations on the Android mobile platform alone, and the Greek government uses it for public announcements such as information on the pandemic.
