BI Intelligence

Instagram is steadily taking the place of Facebook and Twitter among teens and young millennials.

In the last twice-yearly Piper Jaffray survey of US teens, 32% of respondents named Instagram as the most important social network, while only 24% said Twitter was most important and only 14% pointed to Facebook.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we unpack data from over a dozen sources to understand how social media demographics and preferences are still shifting.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from the BI Intelligence report:

• Pinterest has tremendous reach among women. Among US female internet users, 42% reported being on Pinterest in Pew’s late-2014 survey, compared to only 13% of men.
• Instagram has become the most important and most used social network for US teens. 32% of US teenagers cited it as their most important social network in Piper Jaffray’s twice-annual teen survey, compared to only 14% saying that of Facebook.
• Snapchat, Vine, and Tumblr had by far the most youthful user bases of the social networks we looked at. 45% of Snapchat’s adult users are between 18 and 24, followed by Vine (28%) and Tumblr (28%), according to comScore.
• LinkedIn enjoys high adoption among highly educated and high-income users. LinkedIn is used by 44% of Americans with income of $75,000 or more, according to Pew.
• Messaging apps have become more broadly popular but still skew young: 7% of all people in the US aged 12 and older use WhatsApp, according to the Edison Research and Triton Digital survey.
• The aging of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest is more apparent than ever. That’s especially true of Facebook: Less than two-fifths of Facebook’s adult user base in the US is age 18 to 34, according to comScore.