Social Media Usage by Profession or Industry | Market Research 2022

Are you about to launch a B2B marketing campaign targeting a specific industry?

For example, you may want to target all employees in the Technology industry.

Knowing where your target industry spends their time online is crucial to the success of your campaign.

Why waste your ad dollars on a platform that your target audience doesn’t spend their time on?

I figured it would be helpful to start collecting real market research to give to my readers for free.

To give you a leg up on your competition, whether you are a fellow marketer or a business owner.

The survey I conducted asked full-time employees what industry they work in, their seniority level in that industry, and which social media platform they spend most of their time on.

Here you go, here’s all the data I collected.

Hopefully this data can help you better strategize your B2B marketing campaigns.

Just a side note, I recently made a full online course on how to set up Google Ads for B2B industries on Udemy.

If you are looking to strengthen your lead generation campaigns, that course is really helpful.

Anyways, I digress.

I know you are busy and you don’t have time to read this full article, so here’s the gist:

Facebook is still king.

It seems throughout every industry there were no clear signs of a pattern between social media platforms and industry.

The idea was to hopefully discover that employees in a certain industry spend their free time on a certain platform more than another.

But no, it seems across all industries the majority of the employees spend their time on Facebook.

Second was Instagram (which is owned by Facebook).

Third was YouTube.

C-Level executives also showed no pattern in a favored social media platform. My hypothesis here was to see more LinkedIn usage amongst C-Level executives, but no.

I breakdown more of the survey results in the sections below.

 

What Social Media Platform Does Each Industry Use Most?

The survey results show us what social media platform each industry uses most.

If you are targeting one of these industries, this information may be of value to you.

People in the Technology industry seemed to favor Facebook and Instagram over all other platforms.

The employees in the Construction industry also favor Facebook and Instagram.

In the Hospitality industry, those employees greatly favor Facebook.

Employees in the Medical industry prefer Facebook and Instagram over any other platform.

Real Estate agents use Instagram the most.

Employees in Sales tend to favor Facebook and Instagram.

I guess long story short, even in 2022, Facebook is still ruling social media.

 

What Social Media Platform Do CEOs Use Most?

CEOs did not show a specific pattern in favoring one platform over another.

From the survey, each CEO chose a different platform.

The survey also has a smaller sample size, so maybe more of a pattern would have shown with more survey responses.

The one pattern I noticed from CEOs is that they spend the least amount of time on social media.

Also CEOs seem to be platform agnostic.

 

What Social Media Platform Does Each Generation Use Most?

If you are trying to market to a certain age range, this information may be of value to you.

People between the ages of 18-29 prefer Instagram and TikTok.

Furthermore, people between the ages of 30-44 prefer Facebook and Instagram.

The 45-60 age range prefers Facebook and YouTube.

People 60 and up prefer Facebook and YouTube also.

 

What Social Media Platform Does Each Gender Use Most?

Females prefer Facebook, Instagram, then TikTok in that order.

Males prefer Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, then Reddit in that order.

More males from this survey indicated that they don’t use social media than did females.

 

What Is The Most Popular Social Media Platform?

When searching for a chart online of which social media platform has the most users, you will usually find this page.

Similarly, my data shows social media usage in the chart below.

Facebook had over 1 third of all the respondents saying that is their preferred social media channel.

Instagram was at 20% and YouTube was at 14%.

Only 3% of total respondents said they don’t use social media.

In total, Facebook has about 2.9 billion monthly active users, which is far beyond the next closest competitor.

Facebook is also the oldest platform, being created in 2004.

As most people have noticed, TikTok has made quite a splash in the social media space, but mainly with the younger generation.

To be honest, I thought we were going to see a more even spread of social media usage from my survey.

So odds are, your audience is on Facebook at some capacity.

If you run Facebook ads, you also get access to ad inventory in Instagram so it seems Facebook should be a part of your media mix especially if you are in the B2C space.

Utilizing Facebook ads specifically for B2B (Business to Business) typically is for brand awareness campaigns and retargeting conversion campaigns.

Ever since the IOS 14 update, Facebook targeting and tracking have not been up to par with other platforms so I started changing up the Facebook strategies for my B2B clients.

LinkedIn still has a premium audience for B2B but it comes at a premium cost.

A general strategy I use when first launching a new B2B campaign is to send traffic from LinkedIn to a landing page, then retarget those users on Facebook and YouTube.

That strategy has been pretty effective for how simple it is. If you try it out let me know how it does for you.

Summary of The Data

What does all this data mean?

In short, every person treats social media differently.

There was no found correlation with job title or industry and social media usage.

It seems the older generations and more C-Level executives use social media the least but they are still on it.

Facebook seems to have the most active users and instagram has the 3rd most.

It seems in mid 2022, it is still wise to advertise on Facebook and Instagram for every industry.

Let me know what you thought of this article and if you would want to see more marketing studies.

If you are looking to work with an experienced marketing agency on your campaigns, don’t be a stranger, and reach out to us here.