The social networking app you spend most time in can give away your age, according to a new survey carried out by analytics firm ComScore. Snapchat is the biggest hit with younger people, the figures say, with 71 percent of its users in the U.S. aged between 18 and 34 years old.
Facebook, meanwhile, has the lowest user percentage in the 18-34 age range at 38 percent, narrowly behind Twitter at 41 percent. Facebook also registered the highest portion of users aged 65 and over — a tenth of the network’s users in the U.S. have reached retirement age, compared with just 1 percent of Snapchatters. The survey doesn’t cover users aged under 18, though again you would expect Snapchat to be very popular with the younger crowd.
The whitepaper released by ComScore, 2015 U.S. Digital Future in Focus, covers the rise of online video viewing, advertising and e-commerce on the Web, and user searches as well as social media use. Across all ages, Facebook remains the dominant social network, reaching 81 percent of the digital population in the United States.
Other networks popular with “millenials” in the 18-34 age group include Vine, Tumblr, and Instagram. Older people tend to gravitate more towards more established and sophisticated platforms, such as Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest. Another metric measured by ComScore was time spent within an app, and here Instagram beats out all of the competition.
There are plenty of interesting nuggets of data in the report. National Geographic was ranked the number one social brand of 2014, for example, thanks largely to photos of baby animals in the wild. MySpace, meanwhile, is enjoying something of a renaissance — the site pulled in 40 million visits last year after deciding to focus on music and video, nearly five times as much traffic as it registered during 2013. Other platforms enjoying speedy growth through the year were LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Vine.
