Always On: What Drives Consumers to Use Social Media

Welcome to Always On. Each week, we’ll dig into a brand or audience trend you need to know about, tapping into Morning Consult Intelligence, our always-on insights platform powered by 15,000 daily surveys across 40+ countries. That means thousands of brands, audience deep dives, and enough fresh data to make your spreadsheets jealous. Sign-up here to get this email sent to you directly every week.

In the darkness at 2 a.m. when my world is lit only by the glow of my phone providing an endless scroll of content and videos on social media, I sometimes ask myself: Why am I doing this?

Morning Consult Intelligence can answer that. Well, it can’t tell you what specific affliction has driven me to that moment at 2 a.m. — but it can tell you why certain demographics use social media, be it for keeping up with friends, watching live streams or following celebrities and influencers. The chart below looks at the reasons millennials use social media (orange) benchmarked against the general population (gray) and sorted by the reasons that have the biggest difference between the two.

Compared with the general population, millennials are far more likely to be using social media to follow celebrities or influencers, watch live streams or network (though I rarely do that on social media at 2 a.m.) You can explore the audience using social media for networking and business here.

“What are your main reasons for using social media?” is a new behavior we’ve been tracking in Morning Consult Intelligence. We’ve already interviewed hundreds of thousands of respondents about this since we began asking in December, which just goes to show you how many people we reach every single day. At the same time, we started asking respondents about what types of social media accounts they follow. Let’s take a look at that.

Let’s Go Deeper: Audience Insights

We ask respondents about 12 different types of accounts they follow on social media, which provide endless use cases. For example, knowing where consumers who follow beauty experts spend time on social media could inform purchasing decisions. Let’s dive into some insights about these different audiences.

Social media users who follow beauty experts are way more likely to use TikTok
All of these audiences overindex on TikTok, but none more than consumers who follow beauty experts. 81% of these consumers are active on TikTok, which is 48 points higher than the general population and even 13 points higher than the chronically online Gen Z.

Sports fans are following the game and playing the game
Consumers who follow sports figures and teams are 22 points more likely than the general population to play or practice a sport at least once a week.

Nike is a highly favored athletic footwear and apparel brand amongst consumers who follow fitness experts
Compared to Adidas, Converse, New Balance and Skechers, Nike has the highest favorability with 86%. Amongst the general population, Nike and Adidas tie.

Consumers who follow journalists are much more likely to be politically active
61% of these consumers say they are extremely or very interested in politics and public affairs, which is 27 points higher than the general population.

Nintendo and Playstation are the favorite console brands amongst consumers who follow gamers
Microsoft’s Xbox trails behind both of these brands for this audience

Want to play around with these audiences yourself? Clients can login in here and build their own custom audience based on who consumers are following on social media. Want access? Get in touch here.

Let’s Learn More By Asking Morning Consult AI

We pulled a lot of the data in the previous section by using the Morning Consult Audience tool. But Morning Consult’s AI Chat can quickly answer questions like that even faster. This tool draws on over 15,000 new proprietary interviews every single day — which means, unlike other chat bots that rely on outdated datasets, our AI Chat thrives on real-time, living data. This new tool is currently available to clients — inquire here if you want to learn more.

Extra Credit

Social Media Is Just Mainstream Media Now: New Morning Consult data shows that social media is now Americans’ primary daily news source, eclipsing traditional distribution methods like broadcast and cable networks by huge margins

Parents Turn to Food Influencers for Function Over Fussiness: Creative viral dishes may draw headlines, but most consumers of culinary content are looking for functional, staple recipes

Very Demure, Very Mindful, Very Cringey: Social media trends are a minefield for brands: what’s fun and trendy to some consumers is off-putting to others