Move Over TikTok — This Social Media Platform Could Be The New Craze Among Teens

The recent weak performances of social platforms such as Meta Platforms, Inc. META and Snap, Inc. SNAP have been blamed on competition from China-based ByteDance-owned TikTok.

The results of a new survey showed that TikTok may be losing to Alphabet, Inc.’s YouTube in captivating the teen audience.

YouTube was the most used by teens among the online platforms, the results of Pew Research’s 2022 teen online survey showed. The survey sought responses from 1,316 U.S. teens, ages 13 to 17, and was conducted between April 14 and May 4.

About 95% of teens said they used YouTube compared to 67% for TikTok. Snapchat and Instagram were each used by 60% of the respondents. Meta’s flagship app Facebook was used by only 32% of teens.

Read what TikTok is doing in response to backlash over user data privacy

A smaller share of the respondents used Twitter, Inc. TWTR, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit and Tumblr.

YouTube also scores over TikTok in terms of the degree of usage. About 19% of the teens said they used YouTube almost constantly, while TikTok and Snapchat were constantly used by 16% and 15%, respectively.

When probed on how they viewed their social media usage, 55% of the U.S. teens said they spent about the right time, 36% said they spent too much time and 8% said they spent too little time on the platforms.

The survey also found that 54% of the teens think it would be at least somewhat hard to give up social media, and 46% found it at least somewhat easy to do so.