Threads and Bluesky still have a long way to go before they catch up with X in the U.S., according to data from the latest Pew Research Center report released this week.
The research firm asked about these small services for the first time and found that each was used by just under 1 in 10 American adults, or fewer.
While X isn’t one of the largest social networks in the U.S., it’s still a winner in the small social app market that focuses on short, real-time text posts that appear in vertical feeds.
Competition has intensified in this space since Elon Musk acquired Twitter and renamed it to X in October 2022. Musk’s changes to the platform’s content moderation policies and the site’s political shift to the right have some users looking for alternatives.
In addition to the growth of decentralized open source networks like Mastodon and Bluesky, other startups have launched to rival Twitter, including Spill, Post, T2 (Pebble), and Hive. However, many of them have since closed.
Pew’s data shows how tight Company X’s market power remains.
Even Meta, with all its resources and platform power, has yet to beat X with its competitor Threads, the report found.
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According to Pew, 21% of US adults say they have used X, while only 8% have used Threads and 4% have used Bluesky. Meanwhile, Truth Social attracted 3% of US adults.
Despite this competition, X usage hasn’t declined significantly over the years, according to the report. For example, a Pew report released early last year on social media use among U.S. adults found that 22% of U.S. adults used X at the time. A 2021 report showed that Twitter (before it was rebranded to X) was used by 23% of US adults.
In other words, if X is falling, it has been going down for a long time.
This year’s report also found that YouTube and Facebook remain the most widely used platforms among U.S. adults, with 84% and 71%, respectively, saying they have used them.
Meanwhile, 50% of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, 37% use TikTok, 32% use WhatsApp, 26% use Reddit, and 25% use Snapchat.
Many of these services have seen increased adoption over time, Pugh said. TikTok is up from 21% in 2021, and Instagram, which is now used by half of U.S. adults, is up from 40% in 2021. About a third of adults now use WhatsApp, up from 23% in 2021.
Reddit, a darling of the AI era thanks to its numerous content licensing agreements, was used by only 18% of U.S. adults in 2021, compared to 26% of U.S. adults today.
Of course, all of these numbers look very different from social media usage among U.S. teens, where YouTube remains number one, but is followed by other top apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat.
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