A new study released by Pew Research Center on Monday revealed that Pinterest and LinkedIn are more popular than Twitter among U.S adults. The research also reflected that Twitter’s user-base is mostly young adults while Pinterest and LinkedIn are more popular in older users.
The researchers from Princeton Survey Research Associates International conducted phone interviews on 1,801 adults, with age range 18 and above, from August 7 to September 13, 2013.
After tabulating the information gathered, they found that 22 percent of U.S adults prefer the business social networking site LinkedIn while only 18 percent use the microblogging site Twitter. In terms of engagement, 46 percent of social media users that were surveyed chose Twitter over Pinterest; 23 percent said that they like Pinterest while only 13 percent chose LinkedIn. Those who chose Twitter reasoned that they primarily use the network to check for personal messages left by their contacts.
According to the study, "Pinterest holds particular appeal to female users (women are four times as likely as men to be Pinterest users), and LinkedIn is especially popular among college graduates and Internet users in higher-income households."
Aside from Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter, the study also looked into Facebook and Instagram. Figures for Facebook showed an increase on the number of accounts in which 71 percent of respondents said they have a Facebook account, an increase from the 69 percent users from last year’s survey. However, the study showed that even though there are more Facebook users than ever, the younger crowd on this popular social media site tends to gravitate away from it and starts to move towards other platforms such as Instagram and SnapChat.
Experts speculate that the difference in number could be because of the fact that Facebook tends to be more intuitive than Twitter, encouraging its users to keep coming back to the site and use their accounts regularly.
