Though social media just passed its 20th birthday, it still finds ways to reinvent itself… just look at TikTok. The competitive landscape also continues to shift. Once dominated by Facebook, we now see a range of apps in use – from Snapchat to YouTube to Roblox. It turns out that humans are social animals.
But the question is how is the social media industry positioned today, who’s leading in usage and market share, and what networks have the most momentum? One way to answer the latter – and the question of future positioning – is to look at social media usage and preferences of younger generations.
Pew recently did just that in its annual teenage social media survey (n=1,453). Specifically, it looked at social media usage among U.S. users between 13 and 17 years old, with some results that were expected and others that weren’t. The goal was to answer the age-old questions: what are kids using these days?
Fall From Grace
Diving into the results, YouTube is the most widely used social platform by U.S. teenagers with 93 percent of survey responses. It was followed by TikTok (63 percent), Snapchat (60 percent), and Instagram (59 percent). It can be debated if YouTube constitutes social media (it does have followers).
Other than YouTube, the rest of the players in the top four meet expectations and don’t hold any major surprises. Meanwhile, we saw a few other traditional leaders fall from grace. Namely, Facebook and X declined considerably with 33 percent and 20 percent of teenage users, respectively.
Looking back on the same study, Facebook was flying high circa 2015 with 71 percent of teenage respondents reporting use. X meanwhile always lagged a bit behind with 33 percent in 2015 (then Twitter). However, that’s still far greater than its performance in this year’s survey (again, 20 percent).
Beyond binary usage, another key metric adds dimension to these survey results: frequency. There, YouTube likewise comes out on top with 7 in 10 teens claiming to use it daily, while 16 percent identify their active use as “almost constantly.” TikTok also did well for daily use with 58 percent of teens.
TikTok on Top
Beyond users and frequency, another metric can determine the success of any social network: revenue. And all of the above players have varying degrees of monetization and revenue per user. We won’t go into all those metrics today but will look at a representative sample that exemplifies momentum: TikTok.
Specifically, it reached a milestone this week that falls outside of the above Pew Study. Data.ia reports that it reached $10 billion in lifetime consumer spending. By doing so, it becomes the first non-game app to ever reach that lofty total, usually seen from the likes of Candy Crush, which has reached $12 billion.
Not only is this noteworthy, but it doesn’t even represent the full revenue picture for TikTok. Like most other social media, it has an advertising revenue model. But the above just counts consumer spending, which for TikTok means in-app purchases for coins, which are traded within the app for digital goods.
Among other things, this means revenue diversification. As the social media world looks to diversify in the face of ad-revenue headwinds (privacy, economy-impacted ad budgets, etc.), end-user spending is becoming the name of the game. This could be the new social-media revenue frontier. Just ask Snap.
