Every year we get a new “state of social media” report from Pew Research and every year the headlines scream disruption, innovation, a new platform rising to dethrone the old guard. But if you read the latest Pew Research data carefully (and you should), a very different story emerges: Social media isn’t exploding. It’s settling.
- YouTube sits at 84%
- Facebook at 71%
- Instagram stuck at 50%
- TikTok hovering around 37%
These numbers barely move year to year. In fact, Facebook has essentially been flat since 2016. YouTube gained a whole two percentage points since 2023; barely statistical noise.We’re not witnessing a revolution.
We’re watching a plateau.
And when you zoom into age groups, the picture becomes even clearer. Among 18–29 year olds, the group that supposedly defines the future of culture, almost everyone uses everything. Around 95% use YouTube. 80% use Instagram. 68% use Facebook. 63% use TikTok. 58% use Snapchat.
This is not a battlefield with a single winner.
It’s a crowded food court. People wander between stalls, nibble from each plate, and commit to none.
Meanwhile BeReal, remember that hype cycle? Sits at 3% adoption. Proof that novelty without a real use case burns out faster than the venture money funding it.
All Platforms, Same Features
Pew’s dataset confirms something we’ve all felt intuitively: every platform now looks like a remix of every other platform.
Feeds. Stories. Short-form video. Messaging. Shopping.
Algorithms pushing content you didn’t ask for, trying to keep you inside their world just a little longer.
The result? Commodification.
When the feature sets converge, the differences between platforms stop being strategic and start being aesthetic.
YouTube keeps winning because it solves an actual problem: hosting, archiving, and discovering long-form video (and Imaginario AI can help you transform those YouTubes for other platforms). That’s hard to replicate.
TikTok’s insane rise: Mostly novelty and a powerful recommendation loop both of which competitors have now cloned.
Facebook? The data is brutally consistent: it hasn’t grown in almost a decade, despite owning half the social internet. More apps don’t mean more engagement. They mean more fragmentation.
Even among older adults, supposedly the “offline” generation, YouTube still has around 64% adoption. That’s higher than TikTok gets with any age group. A quiet reminder that usefulness > trendiness.
What This Means for Anyone Trying to Reach an Audience
We’ve been conditioned to chase the “next platform,” the “next format,” the “next wave.” And for a long time, that made sense, the land grab was real.
But now?
The land is fully owned. The borders have been drawn.
Audience behaviour has crystallized around four core modes:
YouTube → sit back, learn, watch something meaningful.
Facebook → talk to your existing community, stay in touch.
Instagram → aesthetic discovery, curated-self world-building.
TikTok → quick dopamine hits, novelty, entertainment in fast motion.
Marketers (and founders, creators, journalists, anyone who publishes anything) don’t win by being everywhere. They win by understanding why people are where they are, by creating distinctive niche content, and tailoring the message accordingly.
YouTube users want to learn or be entertained.
Facebook users want to talk to someone they know.
Instagram users want things that look good.
TikTok users want to feel something immediately.
Once you internalize this, something shifts: you stop chasing platforms and start designing stories.
Because here’s the real truth in all this data: The platforms are no longer the differentiators. You are.
What you say, how you say it, how well it resonates, that’s the new advantage.
Platform choice is basic hygiene.
Message-market fit is the edge.
About Imaginario.ai
Backed by Techstars, Comcast, and NVIDIA Inception, Imaginario AI helps media companies turn massive volumes of footage into searchable, discoverable, and editable content. Its Cetus™ AI engine combines speech, vision, and multimodal semantic understanding to deliver indexing, simplified smart search, automated highlight generation, and intelligent editing tools.
