by Vincent Chao , May 2022

 

We conducted a study in spring 2022 to better understand how people use social media.  We Asked 100 Social Media Users Where They Spend Their Time. 100 random frequent social media users from US and Canada participated in a 10 question survey.

The Results

We asked participants, “What do you spend the most time doing in social apps?”. Here’s what we found:

64% – Watch videos
54% – Chat with friends
38% – Share interesting links with friends
38% – Look at automatic feeds
37% – Upload pictures and videos to share
36% – Play games

Watching videos (64%), is the top activity that people do on social media. The next highest activity, chatting with friends, is a full 10% behind. Other activities ranked much lower down.  The addictiveness and popularity of short form videos dominated by tiktok and now replicated by all other platforms take up most of people time on social media today.

 

Social Connectivity and Loneliness

Watching videos even surpass chatting with friends by a significant margin. Chatting with friends is the original reason people started using social media. Results from our study also found that over 65% of population feel lonely (link).

If social media has shifted focus to video streaming, what does it mean for the social connectivity?   This is evidence that there may be a big need for meaningful connections that is inadequately served by existing platforms.

 

Males vs. Females

We also discovered that both male and females reported similar amount of time spent on chatting with friends and sending pictures/videos.

Where they differ was that males are 50% more likely than females to watch videos and send funny links, and 100% more likely to play games on social media.

If you find this article interesting, please like, comment and share this article. If you would like to learn more about our study, please contact the author.

 

Other Interesting Articles

Next, we asked the same users if they ever felt lonely.  Guess what we found?We Asked 100 Social Media Users If They Felt Lonely