Adult Use of Facebook Slides While Tik Tok Gains in Research from Edison

The 2023 Infinite Dial suggests Triple A Stations may need to adjust their social media mix…

By Paul Marszalek
TheTop22.com

Facebook usage slid five percentage points among adults aged 35-54 in the last year, according to the latest edition of The Infinite Dial — the annual scan of consumer media behavior from Edison Research.

In this 25th anniversary of the study, among social media brands used most often, Facebook still dominates, but slipped 61-55% in the past year. Instagram moved up slightly from 10-12%, and Tik Tok moved into a second place tie with Instagram, moving 7-12%. Twitter is now fourth most-used at 9%.

For adult-targeted stations, the data may offer some clarity — or muddy the water. Most stations don’t have the capacity to execute at a high level on all platforms, so doing just a couple of them well is generally the recommendation.

Most focus on Facebook and Instagram, and some add Twitter to the fold. Few have jumped into Tik Tok, as previous data has shown it to have a very young audience. That’s changing, but dropping Twitter for Tik Tok could be risky.

Both are wildcards, with a stripped-down Twitter experiencing outages, and Tik Tok carrying a risk of being banned due to its excessive harvesting of user data.

While any change in the mix would depend on current levels of followers, The Facebook/Insta combination still represents 67% of brands most-used; experiments with Tik Tok might be worth the while.