The Fastest Growing Generational Groups on Social Media
Back in the day, it wasn’t so easy to find information about people. You had to manually look through phone books to find someone’s contact information and then hope it was the person you were looking for. Compared to now, a lot has changed. As social media is a fairly new medium we use to connect with people on a daily basis, each generation has their own preferences for the social media channels they like to use. When social media started gaining traction in the early 2000s, Facebook became one of the most widely used platforms. Over the years, many new social media sites have been created such as Twitter, Instagram, and now, TikTok. Each one of these platforms attracts a specific social media audience, mostly differing by generation. If you’re curious about who’s using what, then keep reading because you came to the right place!
TikTok
One of the newest social media platforms to hit the internet is TikTok—a social media app designed to allow users to share short video clips with their followers. TikTok has been a major success since its release with over 1.5 billion users on the social media app. Most of these users are part of Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012. Trailing behind Gen Z are the Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996.
As TikTok primarily draws in a younger social media audience, the platform is doing well among older adults as well. Specifically, many people refer to this app as being the most “addictive” and “entertaining” social media app currently available compared to other widely used platforms such as Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram.
Instagram is also one of the most widely used social media platforms to date with over a billion active users! This platform acts as a convenient, all-in-one app. People can share posts with their friends and family, businesses can market their products and services, and users can shop their favorite brands using the new shopping feature located on the bottom panel of the Instagram app. There’s no doubt these features attract many people to the app, I mean one billion users is a lot of people, but Millennials take the lead as the largest generational group found on Instagram.
Compared to Gen Z and the Baby Boomers, those born between the years of 1946 and 1964, Millennials are continuing to love using all of the many features Instagram has to offer. Millennials aged 25-34 make up the majority of users found on the app while those between the ages of 18-24 are just trailing behind.
Known as one of the original social media platforms, Twitter continues to draw in an older crowd. With over 187 million active users on the platform, it still stands as one of the leading social media sites today. Specifically, most of these users are Millennials and Gen X, those born between the years of 1965 and 1980. Speaking about both Millennials and Gen X, 35–49-year-olds are leading on Twitter, making up 28.4% of the platform’s users.
Facebook is most definitely one of the first social media sites that comes to mind when thinking about the start of social media. Similar to Twitter, most of Facebook’s 2.8 billion active users are Gen X and Baby Boomers. Facebook used to be pretty popular among the younger crowds back in the day, but times have changed as more and more social media platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat have been introduced. You’re now much more likely to find the older crowds sticking around on Facebook to catch up with their loved ones compared to seeing them use TikTok to catch up on the funny videos of the day.
In summary, each platform draws in its own specific social media audience. Much of these audiences can be categorized into generational groups such as Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and the Baby Boomers. Younger people tend to flock toward platforms such as TikTok and Instagram while the older crowds tend to go for sites like Twitter and Facebook. Everyone has their own social media preferences and being a certain age doesn’t mean you need to use a particular platform, but looking into the data behind these users is always helpful in understanding the audiences behind these popular social media sites!
