Skip to main content

Surprise! Americans use social media to connect with friends, family, Pew study shows

social-media-generic-Shutterstock
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Are you sitting down? Ok, good — because you mind is about to be blown. According to a newly-released study from Pew Internet Research, two-thirds of all Americans who use social networks do so to stay in touch with current friends and/or family. And half say re-connecting with old friends is a “major reason” for using social networks. Shocking, isn’t it?

Connecting with family as a reason to use social networks — which, for this study, include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (really?) and LinkedIn — remain consistent regardless of “age, income, education, race/ethnicity, parental status or place of residence,” Pew found. That said, the study shows that women are significantly more likely than men to cite family connections as playing a major role, with 72 percent of women saying family is a major reason for using these site, versus a mere 55 percent of men.

pew-social-media-graph-1
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Younger Americans, ages 18 to 49, were far more likely to use social networks as a way to keep in touch with current friends and rekindle past connections with older friends than those over the age of 50.

Using social networks to connect with people who share similar hobbies and other interests was another motivation for logging on, but this was more true for older adults than younger ones, with 16 percent of 30-49-year-olds and 18 percent of 50-64-year-olds citing hobbies as a motivating factor. Only 10 percent of 18-29-year-olds say shared interests played a role.

Those who use Twitter were more likely than those who don’t use Twitter to cite the ability to read comments by celebrities, politicians and athletes as a reason for using social networks, with 11 percent of Twitter users saying this is a major reason, and 30 percent saying it’s a minor reason. That compares to 4 percent and 11 percent of non-Twitter, respectively, who say this plays a major or minor role in their social media usage. Black and Latino social media users also more often say connections with famous people is a reason for using these networks.

A full 84 percent of all those survey say they do not use social media for finding people to date.

About the study:

The results reported here are based on a national telephone survey of 2,277 adults conducted April 26-May 22, 2011. 1,522 interviews were conducted by landline phone, and 755 interviews were conducted by cell phone. Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.  For results based on social networking site users, the margin of error is +/-3 percentage points (n=1,015).

[Image via ra2 studio/Shutterstock]

Editors' Recommendations

Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
X rival Threads could be about to get millions of more users
Instagram Threads app.

Threads -- Meta’s rival to X, formerly Twitter -- has just launched in the European Union (EU), a market with nearly half a billion people.

The app launched in the U.S. to much fanfare in July, with Meta hoping to attract X users disillusioned with the turbulence on the platform since Elon Musk acquired it for $44 billion 14 months ago.

Read more
X (formerly Twitter) returns after global outage
A white X on a black background, which could be Twitter's new logo.

X, formerly known as Twitter, went down for about 90 minutes for users worldwide early on Thursday ET.

Anyone opening the social media app across all platforms was met with a blank timeline. On desktop, users saw a message that simply read, "Welcome to X," while on mobile the app showed suggestions for accounts to follow.

Read more
How to create multiple profiles on a Facebook account
A series of social media app icons on a colorful smartphone screen.

Facebook (and, by extension, Meta) are particular in the way that they allow users to create accounts and interact with their platform. Being the opposite of the typical anonymous service, Facebook sticks to the rule of one account per one person. However, Facebook allows its users to create multiple profiles that are all linked to one main Facebook account.

In much the same way as Japanese philosophy tells us we have three faces — one to show the world, one to show family, and one to show no one but ourselves — these profiles allow us to put a different 'face' out to different aspects or hobbies. One profile can keep tabs on your friends, while another goes hardcore into networking and selling tech on Facebook Marketplace.

Read more