Poll: Teens favor YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat over Facebook and Twitter

YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are the most popular social media platforms among teenagers, outpacing sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to a new Pew Research Center poll.

The survey found that 85 percent of teens use YouTube, 72 percent use Instagram and 69 percent use Snapchat. Facebook and Twitter register 51 percent and 32 percent, respectively.

The numbers show a major shift in teens’ social media use. In Pew’s last survey, released in April 2015, 71 percent of teens said they used Facebook. Instagram was the only other site at the time that a majority of teens, 52 percent, reported using.

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“The social media environment among teens is quite different from what it was just three years ago,” Monica Anderson, a lead author of the report, said in a statement. “Back then, teens’ social media use mostly revolved around Facebook. Today, their habits revolve less around a single platform.”

The survey also found that 95 percent of teens have access to a smartphone and 45 percent report using the internet “almost constantly.”

And the respondents, all of whom are between 13 and 17 years old, report mixed feelings about social media’s effect on their generation. Thirty-one percent say it has a mostly positive effect, 24 percent say it‘s mostly negative and 45 percent say it’s neither.

The poll surveyed 743 U.S. teens between March 7 and April 10. The margin of error is 5 percentage points.