Snapchat, Instagram Twice As Popular With Black Teens, Compared To White Teens: Survey

Popular wisdom tells us that Snapchat and Instagram are highly popular apps among teens. And a new survey confirms this fact in percentage terms, along with giving a break-up of how black and white teenagers differ in terms of social media usage.

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"Understanding how teenagers use devices like tablets, desktops, and laptops may seem like old news. But the varying degrees of access of different groups to these platforms have implications for education and future facility with tech tools, including those needed for the workplace," Amanda Lenhart, senior research scientist at the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and a co-author of a report on the survey, said.

Conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago and published Friday, the survey found that American teens in the age bracket of 13-15 years were most likely to use Instagram and Snapchat, compared to other social media networks. While around 75 percent of teenagers use Instagram and Snapchat, the number drops to 66 percent for Facebook and 47 percent for Twitter. Other, niche social networks such as Tumblr, Twitch and LinkedIn fared even worse with fewer than 30 percent of teens using them.

The survey also identified an interesting racial aspect to social media usage: black teens were more likely to use Snapchat and Instagram than their white counterparts. While 40 percent of black teens use Snapchat regularly, only 22 percent of white teens do so. Similarly, for Instagram, 33 percent of black teens use it regularly, while only 19 percent of white teens do so. Black teens are also more likely to use Kik, Skype and Facetime daily, and they even use messaging apps more.

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Even though the two rival social media platforms have similar numbers of users when it comes to total audience size, the survey highlights the fact that different platforms appeal to different races, at least when it comes to their core audience of teens. Both apps are trying to one-up each other, with Instagram recently claiming it has more users for its Stories feature, compared to users of Snapchat’s feature with a similar name.