Social media is popular, can you believe it?! It’s so popular, in fact, that around 65% of the entire adult population in the United States use social media in some form, which is dramatic increase over the 7% that did a decade ago. If you further break down the demographics, you’ll find that men and women use social media fairly equally, with 62% and 68% usage respectively, but when you get into education, the differences become more dramatic. Around 76% of those with college or graduate degrees use social media, which is much higher than the 54% for people with a high school diploma or less.
In a bit of news from the shouldn’t-surprise-anyone department, a lot of people use social media. (That’s kind of why it has that name—social media.) What might come as more of a surprise is just how many people use social media and who, exactly, they are. To that, the Pew Research Center analyzed 27 different national surveys it has conducted between 2005 and 2015 (excluding 2007, for whatever reason). In doing so, the organization found that just around 65 percent or so of all adults use social media right now. And that number has jumped from a very, very meager seven percent back in 2005. “The figures reported here are for social media usage among all adults, not just among those Americans who are internet users. In many previous Pew Research reports, the share of social media users has been reported as the proportion of internet users who had adopted such sites, rather than the full adult population, which continues to include a relatively small share (currently 15%) who still remain offline. In this report, a broader picture of the American landscape is presented, and so the figures are based on the entire adult population,” reads the Pew Research Center’s report.
