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Your mom and 58% of Americans are on Facebook

Elizabeth Weise
USA TODAY
Don't copy and paste that Facebook "copyright" message. It is a hoax.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook remains the most popular social media site in the United States. Fifty-eight percent of the entire adult population have an account, a study released Friday found.

Looking only at adults who use the Internet — 81% of all Americans — Facebook's numbers are much higher. Almost three-quarters of online adults used Facebook, the survey by the Pew Research Center found.

Facebook has become the baseline, "one-stop shop" for online interaction, said Nicole Ellison, a professor of information science at the University of Michigan who has been studying the social media site for the past decade.

"If you look at any line in the post office and see what people are doing on their phones, they're frequently on Facebook," said Ellison, who helped design the Pew study.

"Facebook has become kind of a daily practice for many people," she said. "It's the default social site."

While the percentage of people using Facebook hasn't increased since 2013, the amount of time they spend of the site has. Fully 70% of users visit the site daily and 45% go several times a day, up from 63% who were daily visitors last year.

Facebook's latest conquest is older Americans. This year for the first time more than half of online adults over 65 were on Facebook — 56% of them. That figure represents almost a third of all seniors nationwide.

They come on because their children encourage them. "Their children might say 'Mom, did you see the photos of the kids I posted on Facebook?' and that's when they get on," said Ellison.

Once there, seniors quickly find old friends, colleagues and school mates. "That has its own set of benefits in terms of combating loneliness and creating social support," she said.

Despite Facebook's hegemony, Americans are also beginning to branch out. While not giving up their social space on Facebook, they're supplementing with second and third online hangouts, to reach other specific groups or do other things.

"We found that 52% of online adults were using two or more social media sites, compared to 42% the previous year — so 10% more had adopted another social media platform," Ellison said.

Among all U.S. adults, 23% use LinkedIn, 22% Pinterest, 21% Instagram and 19% Twitter, the survey found.

The photo-sharing platform Instagram skews younger. Fifty-three percent of people between 18 and 29 have an Instagram account. Almost half (49%) of all Instagrammers use the site daily.

Of Internet-using adults as a whole, 26% have an Instagram account.

Half of Internet users with college educations use LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking group. In the online population as a whole, 28% have a LinkedIn account.

Pinterest, the hobby, craft and DIY site, is used predominantly by women. Twenty-eight percent of Internet users have an account. But 42% of American women who are online have an account while 13% of online men do, the Pew survey found.

The survey was conducted in September of 2014 by Princeton Survey Research Associates International for the Pew Research Center. It interviewed 2,003 Internet-using adults nationwide.

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