Consumer Surveys · May 22, 2014

American Usage of Leading Social Platforms, by Age

By Edison Research

As social media usage becomes more widespread, and additional services proliferate, we are seeing some interesting and disparate usage patterns for these services across demographics. Below, we illustrate the percentage of Americans, by demographic group, who use each of the major social networking platforms. The platforms are listed in order of their overall usage (i.e., in order of the percentage of Americans 12+ who use each service, starting with Facebook at 58% overall.)

Some observations of note:

* The relative strength of Facebook across all demographics (and particularly 12-34)

* The balanced usage of LinkedIn 25-64

* The significant spike for Instagram, Snapchat and Vine amongst 12-24 year-olds

Click on each graph for a larger version–and feel free to share!

Social Platforms by Age 1

Social Platforms by Age 2

Social Platforms by Age 3

 

These data points were taken from The Infinite Dial 2014, from Edison Research and Triton Digital. The full study is available here, or on Slideshare.

How the Survey was Conducted: A total of 2,023 persons were interviewed to investigate Americans’ use of digital platforms and new media.  From January 13 to February 12, 2014, telephone interviews were conducted with respondents age 12 and older who were selected via Random Digit Dial (RDD) sampling. The study includes a total of 808 cell phone interviews.

Get our latest insights delivered to your inbox.