Threads and Bluesky still have quite a way to go to catch up with X in the United States, 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 are each used by just under one in ten US adults or fewer.
While X is not one of the largest social networks in the US, it remains 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. 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, 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, has not yet been able to beat X with its competitor, Threads, the report found.
According to Pew, twenty-one percent of US adults said they have used X, compared with only eight percent who have used Threads, and four percent who have used Bluesky. Truth Social, meanwhile, had attracted three percent of US adults. Despite this competition, X has not seen much of a slip in usage over the years, according to the report. For instance, Pew’s report on US adults’ social media use published at the beginning of last year found that X was then used by twenty-two percent of US adults. Its 2021 report showed Twitter, before its rebranding to X, was used by twenty-three percent of US adults. In other words, if X is declining, it has been a long, slow drop.
This year’s report also found that YouTube and Facebook continue to be the most widely used platforms by US adults, with eighty-four percent and seventy-one percent saying they used them, respectively. Meanwhile, fifty percent of US adults said they used Instagram, thirty-seven percent used TikTok, thirty-two percent used WhatsApp, twenty-six percent used Reddit, and twenty-five percent used Snapchat.
Many of these services have seen their adoption grow over time, Pew noted. TikTok is up from twenty-one percent in 2021, and Instagram, now used by half of US adults, is up from forty percent in 2021. Around a third of adults now use WhatsApp, up from twenty-three percent in 2021. Reddit, which has become a darling of the AI era thanks to numerous content licensing deals, was used by only eighteen percent of US adults in 2021, compared with twenty-six percent today.
Of course, all these figures look very different from US teens’ social media use, where YouTube remains number one, but is then followed by a different set of top apps, including TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.