At the same time, social media does much to serve its own content in terms of getting popular appeal and usage.
New research from S&P Global Market Intelligence finds young media consumers are served very well. Seventy-three percent of Gen Zers say they get better recommendations for TV and movies from social media than the broader online video-services platforms -- which can include those owned by legacy media companies.
Overall, 76% of Gen Zers also say “social media services create more content that is personalized for me than TV/video services.”
As expected, older boomers and seniors have a different behavior track -- although the trend is improving. Twenty-four percent say they get better recommendations on TV and movies from social media than other services and 32% get more personalized video content from social media than anywhere else.
In terms of daily time spent on social media, activity is still rising -- especially among Gen Zers, who spent 5.1 hours per day in the third quarter this year -- up from 4.5 hours in the first quarter of 2023.
At the other end of those audience demographics are boomers and seniors at 1.5 hours a day -- at nearly the same level (1.6 hours) in the first quarter of 2023.
Looking specifically at the percentage of social-media users and their different levels of time spent on services, 31% of TikTok users can spend more than two hours a day on the service -- higher than users on Facebook, Instagram, Discord and Pinterest.
By comparison, 16% of Facebook users spend two or more hours on services, compared to 9% with Pinterest. Roughly 50% of users spend less than an hour a day on non-TikTok social media.
Source: mediapost.com