social media usage in Kansas, 2022

Some say there are no new ideas in the world. We’d reframe that today to say–our ideas are constantly evolving. This is especially true in the case of social media. We’ve watched the industry rapidly evolve from its advent in 1997 with sixdegrees.com to the bite sized video content popularized by TikTok today. What was once predominantly popular only among folks ages 18-24 is consumed today by people of all ages.

In order to better understand the evolution of ideas coming tomorrow, we must sometimes take stock of where we stand today. It’s with great gratitude that we thank and dedicate today’s post to our Fall of 2022 High School intern, Mia. As her capstone project, she set out to understand today’s social media usage for people in Northeast Kansas. 

Statistical significance can be a bit of a moving target as it is based on the audience size of the survey. For our use, we determined that roughly 385 responses would give us a 95% confidence level with 5% +/- margin of error. ^{1 2} We’re pleased to say Mia heard from nearly 1,000 respondents across Kansas!

Here are excerpts of the data she was able to pull from these responses:

• If you want to hit NEK social users under the age of 25, you should be looking at Snapchat and TikTok. Snapchat was most likely to be visited on a daily basis with more than 86% of NEK social users age 13-24 reporting to visit it daily, while just over 78% visit TikTok daily.
  
• Survey respondents aged 13-24 in NEK responded similarly to Pew Internet Research’s national respondents on their 2022 survey, but it wasn’t an exact match. Nationally, that demo was mostly likely to use Youtube, then Tiktok, Instagram and Snapchat. NEK respondents placed Snapchat and Tiktok as the platforms they’re most likely to use. Instagram ranked third (56.5%) and Youtube (35.5%) was fifth.
  
• If your NEK target audience is 25 or older, you’re still safe investing your time and financial resources in Facebook. Of our surveyed participants age 25+, nearly 82% said they were on Facebook daily.
  
• While Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Reddit have some avid users, universally few of the participating age demos use any of those platforms on a daily basis. In fact, less than 13% of overall NEK respondents use Twitter, less than 9% use Pinterest, and less than 4% use LinkedIn or Reddit daily.

social media platform daily use by age group

Over the years we’ve conducted many a survey trying to collect exactly this sort of data. Often marketers offer gift cards or other prizes as incentives with measly results. Thanks to all who supported our high school intern, helping her and us to understand social media usage in Northeast Kansas just a little bit better.

Based on this year’s survey, we look forward to capturing NEK data in future years to continue offering relevant data to our local and regional partners. As always,

Go forth. Go digital.

-cohort.crew