The Social Media Platforms Running American Life

Where Americans really spend their online time. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans are not just dabbling in social media, they're living there. YouTube is the undisputed giant. 84% of US adults use it. Facebook is close behind at 71%. Instagram is now used by half of all adults, and TikTok has jumped to 37% of up sharply in just a few years. WhatsApp and Reddit are also climbing. Age is a huge dividing line. Adults under 30 overwhelmingly use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Reddit, while older adults are far more likely to stick with Facebook. Gender, race, education and political affiliation all shape where people go online. Women lean into Instagram and TikTok more. People with college degrees are much more likely to be on Reddit and WhatsApp. Democrats are more likely to use TikTok and threads. Republicans are more likely to use X and Truth Social. And roughly half of all adults go on Facebook and YouTube every single day. Okay, what's the real message? Not exactly a news flash, but people love social media. They're living on it. They're stewing in it all day long every day. There's no one social media platform that everyone watches all the time, but YouTube is pretty close. Facebook is a close second. Let's dig a little deeper here and try to dissect some of these trends. TikTok is huge. Obviously, my friends watching us live today, joining us on TikTok. We're very happy you're here. Let's look at some of the facts in more detail. Again, As I mentioned, 84% of Americans are using YouTube and most of them every single day. It makes it the most widely used platform. Facebook. 71% of Americans are using it. Reddit is one place that I have spent very little time and forgive me, I am ignorant on how Reddit works. It's grown to 26% of adults in America using it's up from 18% just four years ago. Smaller shares go to Snapchat and x compared with YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. But X is still huge. I mean, a lot of criticism about the way Elon Musk has managed X, but it still has a huge audience. Newer platforms like Threads, Blue Sky, Truth Social are used by about 1 in 10 adults or fewer. Now I am on Threads and Blue Sky. As far as posting my content, I'm kind of breaking the rules. I'm not doing what you're supposed to do. I post my videos and content there, but I don't spend time on it consuming content myself. Now Pew looked at 5,000 adults, 5,022 adults between February and and June of this year to measure their platform use. So that's what they found. Some things not particularly surprising. Adults under 30 far more likely than adults, older adults to use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Reddit. So those are the ones that attract the younger crowd. Now TikTok I know had a reputation when it started. I got on five years ago, kind of early on, and it had a reputation of just being for kids. Well, TikTok is so huge today, especially worldwide. There are people of all ages on TikTok. It's certainly no longer just for kid 8 and 10. Adults ages 18 to 29 use Instagram. Now that's a platform I've posted on for years, have not spent a lot of time on it and I don't even know what happened. If you're an expert on Instagram, let me know. They deleted my account on Instagram just a week and a half ago. Not too happy about that. So if you know anything about that, send me a direct message. I would love to figure out how to get back on Instagram. Only 28% of those with some college and 15% with a high school diploma or less use Reddit. Higher educated adults are more likely to use WhatsApp and Instagram. Now I don't really think of WhatsApp as a social media platform. I think of it as a communications tool. I use it every day to communicate with colleagues of mine, vendors, partners, associates and consultants. But I'm not actually watching anyone's video or getting news updates on WhatsApp. But there are WhatsApp channels. We will be starting one just for filtered with TJ Walkerson because some people just prefer to spend time on WhatsApp and I got to go to where people are. So interesting kind of the political breakdown. As you would kind of suspect, Democrats and Democratic leaning independents are more likely than Republicans to use Blue sky and threads. No real doubt there. Those were both kind of started in opposition to the rightward perceived rightward tilt and bias of TikTok. Now X today 24% of Republicans are using X on a regular basis compared with only 19% of Democrats. Now again, I'm a sane, sensible centrist. I try to communicate with as many people as possible. So I stream every day live on X. I do it on, on Facebook, on YouTube, I do it on Rumble, which is considered by many to be far right. And I do it on Blue sky and Threads and those considered more Democratic flavor. So I'm trying to reach as many people as possible. And I've done that, frankly, throughout my career. There were days, even 30 years ago where I would go on CNN, MSNBC and Fox in the same day and certainly multiple times in a given week. So I'm someone where I try to reach people wherever they are. Okay, about half of us adults Visit Facebook and YouTube Daily. That's truly amazing. I mean, if you had told someone 25 years ago that, hey, this thing ABC News and the BBC and these things that everybody watches every day where we kind of worship about how big and powerful the stars are, they're going to be practically irrelevant in 25 years. And this new fangled thing on the Internet, you know, like the you got mail folks, that kind of Internet, that's where everyone's going to watch. You would have been probably committed to an insane asylum if you'd said that. And yet here we are. So social media is big. It's getting bigger every day.