A Look at the 2024 Pew Report on Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024

There have been a lot of reports of late about how social media use is impacting teens choice to read for fun (spoiler alert: they’re reading less), how social media algorithms are moving Gen Z boys more to the right, and how misinformation is both rampant and impacting things like health decisions and our elections. So it’s the perfect time for an updated PEW Report on teens and social media.

Those are all good enough reasons to look at teen social media use. As libraries, however, we have some additional reasons. The entirety of my career has been based on perhaps one defining question: how do we promote books and libraries to teens? We have often thought that the Internet was going to make things easier, but it has arguably made it that much harder to meet teens where they are. There are so many social media tools to employ, finding the right one can be hard fought. Even if you do find it, odds are that in the next couple of years you’ll have to learn a new one. And some of the resources that teens use prolifically are often not readily embraced by administrations that want stricter control on information. And in some circles, there are even discussions about banning the resource entirely. I’m looking at you TikTok.

According to the PEW report, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat are the leading social media platforms among teens. Facebook, often well supported by library systems, is much farther down on the list as it is more popular with older generations. We are all familiar with the impact of BookTok on TikTok, but the books hyped on that platform can often be older titles, both in terms of the age of the intended audience and the year in which they were published. I have seen some fun and appealing book related content on Instagram from places like Scholastic and Simon Teen, but I’ve also chosen to follow those accounts so I have opted in for that content. Many teens don’t know that they can or won’t choose to do so. And although I have listened in on some webinars about using Snapchat to meet the needs of teens in our libraries, it is not something that I hear about very often. The very nature of snapchat can make it one of the hardest tools to use.

Nearly half of teens say they are online almost constantly, up from 24% a decade ago. This share has stayed consistent over the past few years.

Overall, nearly all teens – 96% – report using the internet daily.

The numbers are not surprising; almost a half of teens report that they are online almost constantly. Anyone who works with or parents a teen will find this information unsurprising. Please note, unsurprising is not the same as unconcerning. I think we should all be concerned about the amount of social media is being used by all people groups, including teens.

Teens number one access to the Internet is with the use of a smart phone, far less teens are reporting using devices like a tablet. One area that we can work on marketing is making sure our teen patrons know that they can easily use their libraries digital resources on their devices. Though survey results from 2022 indicate that most readers, including youth, prefer physical books over digital books. Though in the last two library positions I have worked out, we saw a large dip in YA physical book circulation and a big increase in YA digital book circulation. So this may be one of those cases where preference doesn’t always match practical results.

You can read through the full report here: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/12/12/teens-social-media-and-technology-2024/. Use this information as well as your own local success and teen input to put together your teen marketing plan for 2025. Another important takeaway from this past year is that we all need to be working on helping to make sure that our young patrons have digital information literacy skills. This will prove to be even more important as more and more platform embrace AI. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and this information is one tool in our toolbox to help us get it done successfully.

Filed under: Professional Development, Technology