Survey: TikTok has surpassed Instagram as the second most popular social app for US teens, with 34% choosing Snapchat, 29% TikTok, and 25% Instagram
- TikTok has surpassed Instagram as teenagers' second favorite social media app, according to a report published on Tuesday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Teen platform rankings have been churning for years: a 2015 survey had Instagram on top at 33%, then Snapchat took the lead in 2017, before Piper Jaffray's 2018 finding that Instagram had eclipsed Snapchat. This survey marks the next rotation — TikTok, absent from every prior ranking, jumps straight past Instagram into second place.
The result matters because teen preference has been the leading indicator each time: the platform that wins this survey gets the next wave of ad dollars and product imitation. Later coverage bears that out — Pew's 2022 deep dive confirmed TikTok ascendant and Facebook falling, suggesting this 2020 data point caught a real inflection rather than noise.
First-order effects
- Snapchat retains the top spot at 34%, but its lead is now over a fast-riser rather than a fading rival — TikTok at 29% is closer to first than Instagram at 25% is to second.
- Instagram loses the number-two position it held in the 2018 survey, putting direct pressure on its teen-growth strategy just as TikTok's short-video format defines what teens expect.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers chasing the teen demographic get a clear reallocation signal, shifting budget from Instagram toward TikTok and Snapchat, which strengthens those platforms' pricing power with brands.
- Instagram faces a forced product response — competing on TikTok's terms means leaning harder into video and recommendation-driven feeds rather than the follower-graph model that made it dominant in 2015.
Third-order effects
- If the rotation pattern holds — Instagram over Snapchat in 2018, TikTok over Instagram in 2020 — no social platform can treat teen relevance as durable, and product roadmaps will keep chasing whatever format currently owns teen attention.
- The consolidation of teen time around video-first feeds (TikTok rising while Facebook sits far below) points toward an industry structured around algorithmic entertainment feeds rather than social graphs, with messaging apps like Snapchat surviving as a separate utility layer.
The trend: US teen social media leadership rotates every few years — Instagram displaced Snapchat, and TikTok has now displaced Instagram — making teen preference surveys the bellwether for where ad spending and product design go next.