Threads and Bluesky nonetheless have fairly a strategy to go to meet up with X within the U.S., in accordance with knowledge from Pew Analysis Heart’s newest report launched this week.

The analysis agency requested about these smaller companies for the primary time and located they’re every utilized by just below 1 in 10 U.S. adults or fewer.

Whereas X is just not one of many largest social networks within the U.S., it’s nonetheless the one to beat throughout the smaller market of social apps that concentrate on brief, real-time textual content posts that seem in a vertical feed.

This area has seen elevated competitors since Elon Musk purchased Twitter and rebranded it as X in October 2022, as Musk’s adjustments to the platform’s content material moderation insurance policies and the positioning’s rightward political shift despatched some customers on the lookout for options.

Along with the expansion seen by decentralized, open supply networks like Mastodon and Bluesky, different startups launched would-be Twitter rivals like Spill, Submit, T2 (Pebble), and Hive. Many of those have since shut down, nonetheless.

Pew’s knowledge signifies how laborious X’s grip in the marketplace stays.

Even Meta, with all its sources and platform energy, hasn’t but been capable of beat X with its competitor, Threads, the report discovered.

Based on Pew, 21% of U.S. adults mentioned they’ve used X, in contrast with solely 8% who’ve used Threads, and 4% who’ve used Bluesky. Fact Social, in the meantime, had attracted 3% of U.S. adults.

Regardless of this competitors, X hasn’t seen a lot of a slip in utilization through the years, in accordance with the report. For example, Pew’s report on U.S. adults’ social media use printed initially of final 12 months discovered that X was then utilized by 22% of U.S. adults. Its 2021 report confirmed Twitter (earlier than its rebranding to X) was utilized by 23% of U.S. adults.

In different phrases, if X is declining, it’s been a protracted, gradual drop.

This 12 months’s report additionally discovered that YouTube and Fb proceed to be probably the most extensively used platforms by U.S. adults, with 84% and 71% saying they used them, respectively.

In the meantime, 50% of U.S. adults mentioned they used Instagram, 37% used TikTok, 32% used WhatsApp, 26% used Reddit, and 25% used Snapchat.

Many of those companies have seen their adoption develop over time, Pew famous. TikTok is up from 21% in 2021, and Instagram, now utilized by half of U.S. adults, is up from 40% in 2021. Round a 3rd of adults now use WhatsApp, up from 23% in 2021.

Reddit, which has turn out to be a darling of the AI period due to quite a few content material licensing offers, was utilized by solely 18% of U.S. adults in 2021, in contrast with 26% right this moment.

In fact, all these figures look very totally different from U.S. teenagers’ social media use, the place YouTube stays No. 1, however is then adopted by a unique set of high apps, together with TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.