Nearly seven-in-ten Americans currently use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information and entertain themselves.
A social media fact sheet, gleaned from Pew Research Center’s surveys, says when the institution began tracking social media adoption in 2005, just 5% of American adults used at least one of these platforms.
Since then the social media usage has seen a rising pattern, with more people turning to platforms for a variety of reasons including networking.
By 2011 that share had risen to half of all Americans, and today 69% of the public uses some type of social media.
“As more Americans have adopted social media, the social media user base has also grown more representative of the broader population.
“Young adults were among the earliest social media adopters and continue to use these sites at high levels, but usage by older adults has increased in recent years,” the Center said, releasing figures on trends in the use of media over the years.
Among the social media platforms, Facebook is the most-widely used site, and its user base is most broadly representative of the population as a whole.
Smaller shares of Americans use sites such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Pew surveys have revealed that thee usage of the major social media platforms varies by factors such as age, gender and educational attainment.
“For many users, social media is part of their daily routine. Roughly three-quarters of Facebook users – and around half of Instagram users – visit these sites at least once a day.”
