Market Research Trend Report: Social Media

Social media is popular. Yes. But lets break it down to uncover some surprises.

Facebook: 1.06 billion users
Popular with: everyone, women.
Seventy-two percent of women indicated that they used Facebook, and the most active users are young adults 18–29 followed by adults 30–49. Even 35% of people ages 65 and older are on Facebook.

Twitter: 500 million users
Popular with: African Americans, urban dwellers.
Twenty-six percent of African American Internet users surveyed said they used Twitter compared with 14% of Caucasian and 19% of Hispanic users. Twenty percent of people living in urban areas use Twitter compared to 14% in the suburbs and 12% in rural areas.

Instagram: 100 million users
Popular with: African Americans and Latino.
Twenty-three percent of Latino and 18% of African American Internet users use Instagram compared to 11% of Caucasian Internet users.

Tumblr: 100 million blogs
Popular with: specific cities, young users.
Tumblr is a blog-hosting platform with over 100 million blogs. It is most popular in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Its visitors tend to be 20-somethings that are fairly educated and don't have children.

Pinterest: 48.7 million users
Popular with: Caucasians, higher income.
This up-and-coming site has 18% of Caucasian Internet users compared with 8% of African American and 10% of Hispanic users. Pinterest is also more popular among higher-income people with 23% of people with household incomes between $50,000 and $74,999.

What other types of social media do you use? Some examples include Houzz (an online community for architecture, home design and interior design) and LinkedIn (social netoworking site for online professionals).

Source:
A national survey conducted between November 14 and December 9, 2012 on landline and cell phones and in English and Spanish. The results reported here come from the 1,802 respondents who are Internet users, and the margin of error is +/- 2.6 percentage points.

Joanna Brenner, Maeve Duggan, The Demographics of Social Media Users-2012. Pew Internet and Life Project. February 14, 2013 http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Social-media-users/The-State-of-Social-Media-Users.aspx