The Infinite Dial® Reports · April 5, 2016

Americans Still Prefer Facebook, But Snapchat Surges 12-24

By Edison Research

We’ve all seen statistics on how many people use various social networking platforms, but which networks do they prefer to use? In this year’s edition of The Infinite Dial, we asked a random, representative sample of Americans 12+ not only to tell us which social sites and services they used, but also which ones they used the most.

Slide63The winner, unsurprisingly, was Facebook, though the platform’s dominance was slightly down from 2015. With so little change observed year over year, it’s pretty clear to see what happened to those four percentage points Facebook lost: Snapchat, which doubled from 4% to 8%.

The biggest shift here was with Americans age 12-24:

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Again, Facebook leads, but with a plurality–not a majority. Facebook declined significantly with 12-24s as the social media brand used most often, while Snapchat grew from 15% to 26%. In fact, more people in this age group use Snapchat than use Facebook–the first time we’ve seen Facebook not be number one with any demographic:

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How the study was conducted:

A total of 2,001 persons were interviewed to explore Americans’ use of digital platforms and new media. From 1/5/16 to 2/10/16, telephone interviews were conducted with respondents age 12 and older who were selected via Random Digit Dial (RDD) sampling. Interviews were 52% landline phones and 48% mobile phones.

 

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