New Survey Sheds Light on the state of Social Media Messaging Apps in 2015

Social Media has changed the way we interact with each other, forever. Billions of people today using social media and online messaging apps, and it is really hard to predict what the outlook of the social world will be the next year. Surveys and statistics are a really good way to detect new trends, and a new survey from Pew Research has given us a whole lot of data to play around with.

Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think tank based in the capital city of United States, conducted a survey on social media and mobile messaging from a total pool of 1,907 adults (all 18 age or older) from March 17th to April 12th, 2015.

Messaging Apps(Not Including Texting)

• 36% of all smartphone users use online messaging apps like Whatsapp, Kik or iMessage while only 17% use apps with auto-delete messaging features.
  
• Almost half of online young adults(aged 18 to 29) use messaging apps apart from texting.
• Snapchat and other apps with self-destructing messaging features have been really popular lately with the young crowd, and predictably, 41% of these young adults use apps which can delete messages automatically.
  

Social Networks

• 31% of all online adults use Pinterest now, more than double from 3 years back. The number was only 15% back in 2012.
• The number of Instagram users have also doubled, 28% of online adults now as compared to only 13% in 2012.
• Facebook is still growing, but not at the same pace. It is now used by 72% of online adults, compared to 67% in 2012 but with 82% of young adults(aged 18 to 29), the site is still incredibly popular.
• In daily usage numbers also, Facebook clearly takes the lead with 70% users saying the log into it daily. Instagram is close behind with 59% daily users, followed by 27% of Pinterest and 22% of LinkedIn users.
• Twitter is still pretty small compared to Facebook. It is now used by 23% of all internet users and 20% of the entire adult population.

Online Discussion Forums

The number of users of online discussion forums like reddit, Digg, Slashdot has declined significantly.

• From 25% of online adults in 2002, the figure of online adults using discussion forums today is only 15%.
• Among young adults(18 to 29), these sites are still somewhat popular, with 23% of them admitting to using them.
• Tumblr, one of the most popular blogging platform, is now used by 10% of adults and 20% of young adults.

This survey was conducted by Pew Research Center and is based on telephone interviews conducted from March 17,2015 through April 12, 2015 from all the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

The new generation is glued to their mobile screens and it is practically impossible to remain uninfluenced by this rise of social networks as well as messaging apps. After the rise of social media, now it is time for messaging apps to shine. People prefer to use online messaging apps nowadays instead of the text-messaging because not only these online solutions have more features, they are also faster and better. The increased amount of competition in this are has been incredibly good for the instant messaging industry. Just this April, Whatsapp said that they had 800 Million active users, while Viber boasts 600 Million. There are also some other big names like Japan’s Line and China’s WeChat which means that every company is trying to out-step each other by introducing better features and better services.

Source: Pew Research