Facebook leads social pack in US, Twitter sputters, study finds

LinkedIn’s number actually decreased, from 28 percent to 25 percent.

Still, the percentage of online adults who use Instagram, Pinterest or LinkedIn daily has increased since September 2014.

Some 72% of online U.S. adults use Facebook today.

Some 10% of online adults said they used Tumblr, the blogging platform acquired two years ago by Yahoo. However, Facebook’s popularity in younger adults is far more than that of Twitter, as the latter hosts only 32% of online adults, between ages 18-29. That leaves 40 percent of Twitter users to check the service less than weekly, compared to just nine percent for Facebook.

“I’m not so anxious about flattening user growth, because Facebook has proven an ability to expand horizontally”, said Brian Blau, research director at Gartner. Just 38 percent of users logged onto Twitter once per day. 59% of Twitter users that get news from the social network follow breaking news on the platform. 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.

Pinterest more than doubled its user base in the past three years. Sixty-four percent of people aged 50-64 use it. The only large drop comes from people aged 65 years or older, with 48 percent saying they use the platform. The data were based on telephone interviews conducted in March and April among 1,907 adults.

A study out Wednesday finds that Americans, especially younger Americans, are using smartphone messaging apps more, and more frequently, than ever before.

Facebook’s lead is even greater on mobile phones, with a staggering 92pc of all referral traffic from social networking services in Ireland. With Twitter continuing to fall, Pinterest is third in line on 3pc of referral traffic, while Stumbleupon has just 2pc, down from 7pc this time past year.

Pew found that Facebook was notably popular among women, garnering 77 per cent of those who are online, and the 18-29 age group, where 82 per cent use the social network.

China blocks access to Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, so your strategies for marketing on those platforms won’t be worth much if you’re specifically trying to reach a Chinese audience. Its daily active user figure rose to 968 million people.