As of September 2023, YouTube as the most popular social media platform for global users, with 97 percent of respondents reporting to use the popular video platform. YouTube was also the most popular social media among Gen Z users, with 96 percent of respondents in this age group reporting to have used the video platform as of the examined period. Facebook's usage kept steady among among the general digital population, with around eight in 10 reporting to have used the platform. In comparison, the social media's popularity was in free fall among gen Z users with only four in 10 among those surveyed reporting to engage with the Meta-powered platform.

WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube ranked as the most popular social media for Dutch Millennials or 20-to-39-year-olds in 2020, beating, for example, Instagram. In 2020, roughly 90 percent of the Millennial respondents in the Netherlands said they used WhatsApp. Facebook was also popular, with 82 percent indicating they actively used this platform. Both social networks had over ten million users in the country, of which 9.1 million were daily users for WhatsApp and 6.8 million for Facebook.

Millennials are less active on Facebook

Despite that Facebook ranks as the second-most popular social media platform, the Silicon Valley application experienced upheaval in the Netherlands. In a different question asked by the source, 57 percent of the Millennials agreed with a statement that said they spent less time on Facebook than they used to. Privacy concerns were one possible explanation for this. Some respondents also mentioned, though, that the platform had become too time-consuming and would rather spend it on “real life” activities.

Instagram and Snapchat a gateway to Generation Z, not Millennials

Are Dutch Millennials leaving Facebook then for other social networks, such as Instagram or Snapchat? The ranking provided here does to indicate that the 23-to-37-year-olds are part of the user base of the two photo apps. Data looking at the growing penetration rate of the two platforms by different age groups in the Netherlands confirms this. This same data does mention, though, that consumers aged 15-19 used the apps a lot more. Between 2015 and 2018, Instagram’s penetration rate among Generation Z increased by roughly 25 percentage points whilst the youngest generation was the first in the Netherlands to use Snapchat.

According to a survey conducted in the United States between July 2023 and June 2024, 65 percent of Generation Z were using Meta's Instagram, and 63 percent were using YouTube. Moreover, 58 percent of Gen Z in the United States were on TikTok, and 56 percent were using Facebook.

According to a survey of social media users aged between 16 and 24 years in the United Kingdom, 71 percent of respondents used the Instagram mobile app daily as of October 2022. Approximately seven in 10 respondents reported using social video app TikTok and YouTube on a daily basis, respectively. New social app app BeReal, which prompts users to post content once per day, was used by less than three in 10 respondents aged between 16 and 24 years.

As of September 2024 in the United Kingdom, 98 percent of Generation Z, those born between 1995 and 2012, were using social media. The same was true for 97 percent of millennials in the country. Overall, 92 percent of Gen X were on social networks, as were 86 percent of Baby boomers.

In a survey of millennial consumers in the U.S., around 31 percent of women said Instagram had the most influence on their shopping habits, compared to 25 percent of the men surveyed. Younger millennials between the ages of 25 and 29 stated they were most influenced by more visual content-focused platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Meanwhile, those in their 30s and 40s said Facebook was the primary platform shaping their shopping behavior.

A report held in June 2022 among Gen Z and millennials in the United States found that these consumers, aged 16 to 40 years old, were using Facebook most often, with 40 percent saying they did so daily or more. LinkedIn, Twitch, and Nextdoor were the least used social sites for news, whereas YouTube and Instagram were used almost as often as Facebook in this respect.

YouTube was the social media platform with the biggest reach among U.S. Gen Z and Millennial internet users regardless of gender. During the September 2019 survey, 95 percent of male and 92 percent of female respondents stated that they used the online video platform. In contrast, Facebook had a 70 and 78 percent reach respectively.

In 2021, messaging and video sharing platform Snapchat was more popular than TikTok among Gen Z users in the United States. TikTok counted around 37 million users who were born between 1997 and 2012, while Instagram reported around 33 million users in the same period. Snapchat, which counted 42 million Gen Z users, is projected to reach 49.5 million users in the examined demographic by 2025. Overall, platforms such as Pinterest, Twitter and Reddit had significantly less users amongst this age group.

As of January 2021, 57 percent of 12 to 34 year olds in the United States were using Facebook, this is a decrease of seven percent on the previous year. Overall, 70 percent of those aged between 12 and 34 years were using Instagram, which is a two percent increase from 2020 and a four percent increase since 2019. As of 2021, Pinterest and LinkedIn both steadily increased their user base since 2019 amongst this age group in the United States. TikTok had the largest growth in audience, rising from 25 percent in 2020 to 44 percent in 2021.

According to a survey conducted among Generation Z in Japan in November 2024, more than 86 percent of the respondents used YouTube. YouTube was the leading social media platform, ahead of Instagram, X, and TikTok.

In 2023, Instagram claimed the top spot as the preferred social media platform for shopping among Gen Z and millennial consumers. However, Gen Z also showed an inclination towards shopping via TikTok, while millennials leaned towards both YouTube and Facebook over the trendy Chinese short-video platform. Conversely, older generations exhibited similar preferences for social commerce, with both favoring Facebook and YouTube over the more visually appealing Instagram and TikTok.

According to a survey conducted in the United States between July 2023 and June 2024, Millennials made up 37 percent of social media users in the country. Overall, Generation Z accounted for one quarter of the United States' social media audience, and Generation Z made up 28 percent. Additionally, Baby boomers accounted for just ten percent of users.

According to a survey run in Spain in March 2023, 86 percent of Millennial respondents used WhatsApp, making it the most popular social media platform in the country among that population group. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube followed closely, with an audience reach of 75 percent, 74 percent, and 73 percent respectively.

According to a survey conducted in the United States in July 2022, three-quarters of Gen Z adults had used YouTube in the past month at least once a day, and 19 percent had used the platform at least once a week. For TikTok, 59 percent of respondents said they had used the platform every day within the past month. Additionally, 72 percent of Gen Z adults said they had not used LinkedIn, and 86 percent reported the same for Clubhouse.

As of September 2018, 21 percent of U.S. Twitter users were between 25 and 34 years old. Furthermore, 55 to 64 year olds accounted for the same amount of U.S. Twitter audiences. A separate study from April 2019 shows that the majority of U.S. Twitter users in the United States were male. Twitter users in the United States While constantly standing in the shadow of more popular social networking services Facebook or Instagram, Twitter is one of the biggest social networks worldwide. In 2019, it was found that 22 percent of adults in the United States used the microblogging service, down from 24 percent in the previous year. The United States was also the online market with the biggest Twitter audiences, ahead of Japan and the United Kingdom. Twitter reported 68 million monthly active Twitter users in the United States as of the first quarter of 2019. Twitter marketing Twitter is also a popular platform for marketers to promote their businesses. During a 2018 survey, 62 percent of responding global marketers stated that they used Twitter for marketing purposes. However, according to internet users in the United States, the platform ranked behind all other social media platforms in terms of shopping influence.

Data from a survey held in August 2022 in the United States revealed that the most popular news source among millennials was social media, with 45 percent of respondents reporting daily news consumption on social networks. This was more than double the share who got their news via radio. When it comes to trust, though, social media does not fare well.

Social media and news consumption

As adults of all ages spend more and more time on social media, news consumption via this avenue is likely to increase, but something which could affect this trend is the lack of trust in the news consumers encounter on social platforms. Although now the preferred option for younger audiences, social networks are among the least trusted news sources in the United States, and concerns about fake news remain prevalent.

Young audiences and fake news

Inaccurate news is a major problem which worsened during the 2016 and 2020 presidential election campaigns and the COVID-19 pandemic. A global study found that most Gen Z and Millennial news consumers ignored fake coronavirus news on social media, but almost 20 percent interacted with such posts in the comments section, and over seven percent shared the content. Younger news consumers in the United States were also the most likely to report feeling overwhelmed by COVID-19 news. As younger audiences were the most likely to get their updates on the outbreak via social media, this also made them the most susceptible to fake news, and younger generations are also the most prone to ‘doomscrolling’, an addictive act where the reader pursues and digests multiple negative or upsetting news articles in one sitting.

Gen Z women are more likely than Gen Z men to make purchases via social media in the United States and the United Kingdom. At least 43 percent of female respondents in that generation had experienced buying a product on social networks as of January 2022, while the male usage rate stood at 37 percent. Discovering new brands via social media or visiting brands' social media stores was also more popular among Gen Z women than their male counterparts.

WhatsApp was the most popular social media platform for Gen Z, or 15-to-19-year-olds, in the Netherlands in 2020, with nearly all respondents using the service. This according to domestic survey information. The messenger service already ranked as the Netherlands' overall most popular social medium in terms of users. YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat were also very popular, all reaching a penetration rate of over 70 percent. Karaoke app TikTok, on the other hand, was much less popular, as only 17 percent of them used the video application.

Why is TikTok low in this ranking?

Chinese video and sing-along application TikTok, formerly Musical.ly, made a global name as being one of the most popular smartphone apps for Generation Z. Here, it seemingly ranks low as the source used ages 15 and up. This age group might potentially fall outside TikTok’s user base. While there is no data for the Netherlands that investigates the age groups below 15, download numbers suggest the app grew in popularity in the Netherlands after Bytedance (TikTok’s owner) merged Musical.ly and TikTok in August 2018.

A clash of generations
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gen Z uses Instagram and Snapchat much more often than their Millennial counterparts (defined by the source as 20-to 39-year olds). Interestingly, Pinterest was also more popular among the younger generation. The picture gallery app does not rank among the most popular apps in the Netherlands, reaching less than five million people in 2019. Facebook, on the other hand, was more preferred by Millennials than it was by Generation Z.

As of May 2024, 53 percent of Gen Z respondents spent more time on social media than they did a year ago. Millennials showed a similar dynamic, with 48 percent stating that their social media use had increased compared to the previous year.