Women Dominate Most of Social Media

• Men are more active on Twitter, Linked-In

In the US, gender, income, and education have little impact on whether or not someone uses social media. But these factors do have a big impact on which social networks people opt to use.

Business Insider reports many top social networks – including Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram – have a strong skew toward female users. Women in the US are more likely to use Facebook than men by about 11 percentage points, Pinterest by 29 percentage points, and Instagram by 7 percentage points, according to Pew. But Twitter and LinkedIn continue to attract a mostly male audience.

In an in-depth report, BI Intelligence unpacks data from over a dozen sources to understand how social media demographics and preferences are still shifting.

Click To Enlarge

Here are a few of the key takeaways from the BI Intelligence report:

• Pinterest has tremendous reach among women. Among US female internet users, 42% reported being on Pinterest in Pew's late-2014 survey, compared to only 13% of men.
• Instagram has become the most important and most-used social network for US teens. 32% of US teenagers cited it as their most important social network in Piper Jaffray's twice-annual teen survey, compared to only 14% saying that of Facebook.
• Snapchat, Vine, and Tumblr had by far the most youthful user bases of the social networks we looked at. 45% of Snapchat's adult users are between 18 and 24, followed by Vine (28%) and Tumblr (28%), according to comScore. 
• LinkedIn enjoys high adoption among highly educated and high-income users. LinkedIn is used by 44% of Americans with income of $75,000 or more, according to Pew.
• Messaging apps also have become more broadly popular, but still skew young: 7% of all people in the US aged 12 and older use WhatsApp, according to the Edison Research and Triton Digital survey.