Study Finds Social Media Use Among Adults Has Stalled

Twitter went public in November 2013 at an initial public offering price of $26 per share. Considering that Twitter prides itself on being the “real-time information” (i.e., news) network, it’s interesting that more users don’t use it to read the news. Only those over 65 weren’t broadly represent in the social network’s user list.

Since its inception, Facebook has outperformed other rival social networks platforms by a considerable lead.

But, with Facebook remaining the most popular social media service in the world, social messaging is free and globally used, but even though Twitter is very successful it has not attracted more users than Facebook since last September. But Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest saw an uptick in daily engagement numbers.

Facebook on the other hand is slightly more popular amongst white than black internet users, but more than makes up for this with Instagram: 47 percent of black adult internet users access Instagram, whereas only 21 percent of white adult internet users do so. Moreover, 59% of Instagram users say they use the site daily, while 27% of Pinterest users said the same. “I have six kids under 23 and none of them use Facebook regularly”.

These apps are especially popular among young adults, and were used by 49 percent of smartphone owners between the ages of 18 and 29, Pew found.

Wednesday’s report stemmed from telephone interviews conducted between March 17 through April 2015 with 1,907 adults nationwide, according to the Pew Research Center. However the social media platform quite surpassed Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn in terms of popularity, but in the APAC region, Google cracks the top five easily.

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm allows it to put pretty much whatever it thinks is relevant to its users front and center.

In addition to the growing use of messaging apps (e.g., Snapchat, WhatsApp, iMessage), the report examines usage patterns and demographics associated with the major social networking sites. As for LinkedIn, a quarter of online adults use the site, up from 20% in 2012, the survey noted.

In the past year, Facebook has also debuted live video-streaming service, which enables users view live events’ coverage.

Twitter, launched in 2006, quickly shot to popularity reaching 304 million users in 2015.