Social Networking Sites are playing a dominant role in our daily lives. Up till now, we get a long list of hundreds of SNS with the notable ones such as Face book, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Live Journal, etc.
Starting from August 7 to September 16, 2013, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project conducted a survey on social networking usage in the U.S. The survey was based on the data from telephone interviews among a sample of 1,801 adults, age 18 and older. Without any surprise, Facebook remains the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, although some other SNS such as Pinterest and Instagram are making huge progress. There were some key findings on the survey, for example, a striking number (42%) of online adults in the U.S. are starting to use other platforms; the number of Instagram users is more or less the same as that of Facebook users on a daily basis.
Compared with last year, around 71% of online adults are using Facebook, a slight increase from the 67% of online adults who used Facebook as of late 2012. In the meanwhile, other sites have also made great progress. LinkedIn usage went from 20 percent to 22 percent; Pinterest has attracted 21% of users, 6% increase than that of last year, while Twitter has got the same great achievement with 4% increase in the number of users. As the study implies, all of those platforms have developed their own unique demographic user profiles. For example, a majority of Twitter and Instagram users are younger adults, urban dwellers, and non-whites. LinkedIn particularly appeals college graduates and internet users in higher income households. Pinterest is loved by most female users (the number of female users is nearly four times that that of male users).
As to the usage of the five specific sites (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn), the survey revealed that, about 36% of online adults use a single social networking site while 42% use two or more of the SNS at the same time. Besides, 84% of people replied that Facebook was the major and only platform that they were using frequently. In the meanwhile, 8% of people were using LinkedIn, 4% for Pinterest and 2% each for Instagram or Twitter.
Additionally, Facebook also has got the highest level of engagement with 63% users visit the site on a daily basic. As Pew told us, “with 40 percent logging on multiple times a day”, apparently, the user number of both Instagram and Twitter was much smaller, however, they have got a relatively higher frequently visiting rate. You see, around 57% of Instagram users visit the site at least once a day (with 35% doing so multiple times per day), and 46% of Twitter users are daily visitors (with 29% visiting multiple times per day). All that said, many people couldn’t help but ask “is Facebook starting to give way to those sites like Instagram and Twitter?”. There was even a small-scale media frenzy about Facebook was “dead and buried”. However, Pew didn’t specifically address the question. Come what may, Facebook stills remains the most popular social networking service among U.S, entrenching in the mainstream American life, which is something that none of its competitors can match.
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