As of 2021, the most popular social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Facebook is a website which allows free profile users to connect with others in an online space. It allows users to share pictures, music, videos, and articles, as well as their own thoughts and opinions with whomever they wish. Acquired by Facebook in 2012, Instagram is a free, online photo-sharing app and social network platform. It allows users to edit and upload photos and short videos through a mobile app. Users can add post captions, use hashtags, and location-based geotags to index these posts then make the posts searchable by other users within the app. Each user post  appears on their followers’ Instagram feeds and can also be viewed by the public when tagged using hashtags or geotags. Users also have the option of making their profile private so that only their followers can view their posts. Lastly there is Twitter, a microblogging site where people communicate in tweets. Tweeting is posting short 258 character messages for anyone who follows you on Twitter, with the hope that your words are useful and interesting to someone in your audience.

When you join a social media platform such as Facebook, you become a part of their social media demographics, which is in short, is a particular sector of a population that you are a part of that regularly utilize specific social media platforms. These are used by digital marketers to cultivate social media strategies that align with the needs and habits of different demographic groups on each social media network. In the next three paragraphs, I will walk through the social demographics available on Social Media Demographics to inform your brand’s strategy in 2021 as to what the break down of users and the user device types.

First up is Facebook, which has about 2.7 billion active monthly users, with 25-34 (26.3%) year-olds being the largest group. Of all the users, 44% female, 56% male but they all tend to spend 38 minutes per day on Facebook. The large influx of boomers to Facebook in 2021 makes it an excellent place to advertise for older demographics. But they also are being joined by many teenagers although it’s definitely not their preferred social media platform. Next up is Instagram, which has about 1 billion active monthly users 33.1% are in the 25-34 age range and 57% female, 43% male compared to Facebook’s 26.3% 25-34 year-olds which are 44% female, 56% male and Twitter’s 30-49 (44%) year-olds which are 32% female, 68% male. Most Instagram users spend 29 minutes per day on Instagram, and it is the third U.S. teens’ preferred social platform and recent Instagram stats show that Instagram is a high motivator for shopping.

Twitter is the last of the top three social media platforms at 187 million daily active users in of which 44% are in the 30 to 49 age bracket with 32% being female and 68% male. They tend to spend about 3.53 minutes per session in a given day or week. 80% of tweets are produced by the 10% of the most active accounts, but interestingly, 42% of Twitter users have a college degree of some type. But across the board, there seems to be more men than women on social media.

As I mentioned in the earlier three paragraphs, on average, according to Social Media Demographics to inform your brand’s strategy in 2021, each person spends about 23.51 minutes per day on each of the social media platforms. But Facebook is the fastest growing social media network out of the three, with 69% of Americans using it and it is the second fastest growing network. It has not grown significantly in numbers, but many people say that they are using the platform from 2019 to 2020; but 81.8% of people use only a mobile phone to access Facebook, 16.7% use a mobile phone and computer, and 1.5% use only a computer to access Facebook. The reason that Facebook is becoming more popular is because it used by many as the only place of updates. Next, Instagram is the third fastest growing social media platform is which has grown 3% since 2019 and 40% of Americans use the platform. They break down into four categories of user accesses: 47% smartphone users, 31% Tablet users, 20% computer users, and the last 2% are other random devices. Lastly, Twitter is the seventh fastest growing social media platform, with only a 1% increase in usage since 2019 and only 23% of Americans actually use Twitter, and less than 50% of those using it daily. In 2015 (that was the newest statistics I could find) 61 million monthly Twitter users were on desktop and 241 were mobile.

So to sum this up, Facebook is the largest social media platform, especially when you add Instagram in and the largest group of users are the 25 to 35 age range the male population. This means that the adult male population has a high interaction rate with social media and ads aimed at this age group are more likely to have an impact. So, that is what a demographic is and this is all for DMD 113 week 9 understanding social media demographics.