How Teen and Adult Social Media Usage Has (And Hasn't) Changed

Social media has begun to face a reckoning in the past few years—over how much time we spend on it, how it affects us, continued indictments and scandals over how content should be moderated, and how much responsibility Silicon Valley bears for its negative consequences and ripple effects on everything from elections to the spread of misinformation. But usage trends haven't changed all that much.

Pew Research Center surveyed social media usage and popularity among US adults from January 8 to February 7, 2019, and found that YouTube at 73 percent and Facebook at 69 percent remain by far the most-used social platforms. Overall, the share of US adults who use various social media remains more or less unchanged from early 2018.

Since the sharp uptick we saw at the beginning of the decade, social media growth has certainly slowed in recent years as platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter begin to plateau in the US. Pew found that the shares of adults who say they use those apps has remained about the same since 2016.

For those ages 18 to 24, Instagram and Snapchat are king. 75 and 73 percent of that age group, respectively, use the apps regularly. Instagram is the only platform for which Pew found an uptick in overall usage from 2016 to 2019 (Pew began measuring YouTube, Snapchat, and WhatsApp usage in 2018).

Investment banking firm Piper Jaffray's biannual "Taking Stock With Teens" survey shows similar social media usage trends among teens. From 2015 to 2019, historical survey data shows that Snapchat and Instagram use has increased among teens, while Facebook and Twitter use has steadily plummeted.

Of the more than 8,000 teens surveyed in 2019, 41 percent chose Snapchat as their favorite social media platform (down from 45 percent in 2018) while 35 percent chose Instagram as their app of choice. Instagram is the most-used platform overall in the survey, even though more teen users preferred Snapchat.

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As with all social media, the best measure of its potency is daily active use: how many times you open the app during the day, sometimes without even registering that you did so, or mindlessly scrolling without a reason. Pew found that around three quarters of Facebook users are daily active users, with over half using it multiple times per day. For Snapchat, it's 46 percent of users opening the app several times a day; 42 percent of Instagram users and 32 percent of YouTube users do the same, according to Pew.

The figures go up significantly for younger age groups. In the 18-to-29 demographic, 68 percent use Snapchat multiple times per day, and 60 percent open Instagram several times a day. Regardless of how old you are, if you feel as though you're spending too much time on social media to the detriment of other areas of your life, there are proactive ways to change those behaviors. Check out our simple tips for how to wean yourself off unhealthy smartphone and social media use.

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