Pew’s latest social media report shows X’s staying power in the U.S., despite competition

Threads and Bluesky still have quite a way to go to catch up with X in the U.S., according to data from Pew Research Center’s latest report released this week.

The research firm asked about these smaller services for the first time and found they’re each used by just under 1 in 10 U.S. adults or fewer.

While X is not one of the largest social networks in the U.S., it’s still the one to beat within the smaller market of social apps that focus on short, real-time text posts that appear in a vertical feed.

This space has seen increased competition since Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X in October 2022, as Musk’s changes to the platform’s content moderation policies and the site’s rightward political shift sent some users looking for alternatives.

In addition to the growth seen by decentralized, open source networks like Mastodon and Bluesky, other startups launched would-be Twitter rivals like Spill, Post, T2 (Pebble), and Hive. Many of these have since shut down, however.

Pew’s data indicates how hard X’s grip on the market remains.

Even Meta, with all its resources and platform power, hasn’t yet been able to beat X with its competitor, Threads, the report found.

According to Pew, 21% of U.S. adults said they have used X, compared with only 8% who have used Threads, and 4% who have used Bluesky. Truth Social, meanwhile, had attracted 3% of U.S. adults.

Despite this competition, X hasn’t seen much of a slip in usage over the years, according to the report. For instance, Pew’s report on U.S. adults’ social media use published at the beginning of last year found that X was then used by 22% of U.S. adults. Its 2021 report showed Twitter (before its rebranding to X) was used by 23% of U.S. adults.

In other words, if X is declining, it’s been a long, slow drop.

This year’s report also found that YouTube and Facebook continue to be the most widely used platforms by U.S. adults, with 84% and 71% saying they used them, respectively.

Meanwhile, 50% of U.S. adults said they used Instagram, 37% used TikTok, 32% used WhatsApp, 26% used Reddit, and 25% used Snapchat.

Many of these services have seen their adoption grow over time, Pew noted. TikTok is up from 21% in 2021, and Instagram, now used by half of U.S. adults, is up from 40% in 2021. Around a third of adults now use WhatsApp, up from 23% in 2021.

Reddit, which has become a darling of the AI era thanks to numerous content licensing deals, was used by only 18% of U.S. adults in 2021, compared with 26% today.

Of course, all these figures look very different from U.S. teens’ social media use, where YouTube remains No. 1, but is then followed by a different set of top apps, including TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.