More youngsters into social media, as compared to adults

New York, January 31: According to a survey, Adults between (35 to 49) were found to spend an average of 6 hours 58 minutes a week on social media, compared with 6 hours 19 minutes a week for their younger counterparts.

The silly millennials, attached to their phones, unable to accomplish the simplest tasks without scrolling their Instagram feeds, snapping their friends and or tweeting insanely.But a Nielsen report released last week shows that Americans from 18 to 34 are less obsessed with social media than are some of their older peers.

More predictably, adults 50 and overspent significantly less time on social media, with an average of 4 hours 9 minutes a week on the networks. Sean Casey, the president of Nielsen's social division, said that the finding had initially surprised him, because "the going thought is that social is vastly owned by the younger generation."

"It's kind of synonymous," said Casey, who wrote the foreword to the report.

Casey , 46, said that eventually, the finding started to make more sense to him. "At a time when we wanted to be connected, it came out right when we were at the top of our media consumption," he said."It's become second nature to our generation."

The finding emphasized how ubiquitous the smartphone has become. The report, released on January 17, found that in the US, 97% of people 18 to 34 and 94% of people 35 to 49 had access to smartphones. Seventy-seven percent of those 50 and older used smartphones, the report found.

The 29-page report was based on data from 9,000 smartphone and 1,300 tablet users from across the country from last July through September.The data was not self-reported.

The report also broke out which social networks were most popular on smartphones, finding that Facebook still ruled the roost on mobile, with about 178.2 million unique users in September.

It was followed by Instagram with 91.5 million unique users; Twitter, with 82.2 million unique users; and Pinterest, with 69.6 million users.

Despite the hype, Snap chat, a favorite of younger users, was sixth on the list, behind LinkedIn.

Finally, the report looked at second-screen activity on social media, measuring how many times Facebook and Twitter users used those sites to post or tweet about programs that they were watching or to interact with others' posts and tweets.

Again, in this category, it was Generation X that couldn't look away from its device screens: On an average day, the report found that 42% of those interacting with TV on Facebook were from 35 to 49, while only 40% of millennials were doing the same thing.