This week’s will it, won’t it TikTok drama had us thinking… what is America’s favorite social media platform? Will we all survive without the latest social obsession if in fact it does eventually go away? The numbers might surprise you given the commotion over this app going away.

Using the MRI-Simmons 2024 doublebase survey, we coded their responses to Panorama for this analysis. It is important to note that this survey only counts adults over the age of 18, so there is some undercounting on some of these platforms for preteens and teens with smart phones and social media accounts. We looked specifically at the percentage of adults who used these social media apps in the last 30 days, so people with an account but not users are not included as well.

It is no surprise that Facebook is generally used across various ages and genders, while platforms like NextDoor and LinkedIn are more heavily used by older Americans, and Snapchat, TikTok and Reddit are used by younger generations. Nearly 85% of adult Americans reported using some form of social media in the last 30 days. As expected, younger Americans use social media far more than their older counterparts, which is shown in the chart below. The lowest segments for each service are all segments that tend to be older generations.

Below are national maps showing Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn and Nextdoor users. We noticed a few things mapping these variables, mostly as you would expect. Snapchat is mostly used by adults in small towns (remember, no kids are in this data), Reddit users are young and live in urban areas, TikTok is unsurprisingly just young people, and LinkedIn is mostly used by upper middle class urban adults. Most surprising to us is that Nextdoor users are living in coastal urban settings, plus the mountain west states as well as urban areas, all mostly higher crime areas, as neighbors are likely warning others about crime or asking for camera footage. On all maps, darker blue indicates a higher concentration of users, while lighter green indicates a lower concentration of users.