Research institute · Pew Research Center
How teens use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat differently
Pew's April 2026 survey of 1,458 US teens shows that TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat are not interchangeable. Each platform owns a different teen behaviour, and the planning splits matter for any UK brand running paid social or creator-led work into Gen Z.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 1,458 US teens aged 13 to 17 surveyed by Pew between 25 September and 9 October 2025, with parental consent and matched parent responses.
- 57% of teen Snapchat users send direct messages on the app daily, Snapchat is the messaging-first platform of the three.
- 60% of teen TikTok users say they go to the platform for product reviews, a bigger share than for Instagram or Snapchat.
- 44% of parents say their teen spends too much time on TikTok, a 16-point gap above what teens report.
- 28% of teen TikTok users say they spend too much time on the platform, the highest self-reported overuse of the three sites.
- 40% of teen TikTok users say the app hurts the amount of sleep they get, against roughly 25% who say the same of Instagram or Snapchat.
- 44% of teen Snapchat users say the app helps their friendships, the platform's clearest standout finding.
- 70% of teen users say their overall experience on each of the three platforms is mostly positive; just 3% say it is mostly negative.
- 30% of teen Snapchat users have personally experienced harassment on the platform, name-calling, rumours or physical threats, versus around 20% on Instagram or TikTok.
- 25% of parents say social media hurts their teen's mental health, against just 8% who say it helps, the parent verdict is sharply more negative than the teen's own.
What the report covers
Pew Research Center asked 1,458 US teens aged 13 to 17, alongside their parents, how they use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, how often they message and post, and how each platform affects their sleep, productivity, friendships and mental health. The fieldwork ran from 25 September to 9 October 2025, with results published 15 April 2026. The overall margin of error is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
The headline takeaway is that the three platforms are not interchangeable. TikTok dominates entertainment and product discovery, Snapchat owns daily messaging and friendship maintenance, and Instagram sits between the two on most metrics. Teens shift behaviour to fit each app rather than treating them as a single "social media" channel, a distinction that has been blurred in most UK media planning conversations.
The survey also surfaces a clear parent-teen perception gap. On every harm Pew measured, screen time, sleep, mental health, friendships, parents are more concerned than teens. The 16-point gap on TikTok overuse (44% of parents versus 28% of teens) is the cleanest example. That gap is itself an audience signal for any brand selling to parents of teenagers, even when the product or service is aimed at the teen.
What this means for UK marketers
The data is US-specific, but the platform behaviours transfer cleanly to the UK. Three operational reads for UK brands and the agencies running their digital marketing work into Gen Z audiences:
Plan creative and media to the platform job, not the demographic. A single piece of "teen content" pushed across all three platforms ignores what teens actually do on each one. TikTok is for entertainment, product reviews and increasingly news; Snapchat is for messaging close friends and posting throwaway moments; Instagram sits in between, weighted toward celebrity and aspiration content. Brands running Meta Ads across Instagram should split creative against discovery (Reels, Explore) and consideration (feed, Stories) rather than treating Instagram as one surface, and TikTok deserves dedicated production budget rather than recycled Instagram cut-downs.
TikTok is now a product-research channel, not just an awareness channel. Sixty per cent of teen TikTok users go to the platform for product reviews. For UK ecommerce, that means TikTok is a search and consideration surface alongside Google. Showing up reliably means dedicated organic creator content (TikTok Search treats hashtag- and audio-anchored content preferentially), Spark Ads on top-performing creator posts, and product detail pages that hold up when an audience clicks through after watching a 30-second review. The same structured-content discipline that wins traditional SEO compounds here too, schema-marked product data, clean specs, and answers to the obvious questions a creator might pose.
The parent-teen perception gap is an audience, not a footnote. Parents see TikTok overuse at 44% versus 28% from teens themselves; one in four parents say social media hurts their teen's mental health. Brands in parental controls, screen-time tools, mental wellness, sleep, tutoring and family-tier subscription products are reaching an audience that is actively worried, and the worry maps onto specific platforms (TikTok for screen time, Snapchat for messaging exposure). The UK regulatory backdrop reinforces this: under the Online Safety Act, platforms now face statutory duties on protecting under-18s, and parent-facing safety messaging from brands lands into a more receptive audience than it did a year ago.
Read this alongside Pew's earlier study on social media as a health information source, where reach (36% of US adults) sits well above trust (7% rate it as highly accurate). The pattern is consistent: teens are on these platforms heavily, but their experience is more measured than the headline reach numbers suggest. The brands that win design against the actual behaviour, not the cliché.
How they got the data
Pew Research Center surveyed 1,458 US teens aged 13 to 17 alongside their parents, online from 25 September to 9 October 2025. The teens were recruited via their parents through Ipsos's KnowledgePanel, a probability-based online panel. Findings about teens represent the views of all US teens 13 to 17 living with their parents; findings about parents represent all US parents of teens in that age range. The overall margin of error for both samples is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
The study compared three platforms, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, across reasons for use, frequency of messaging and posting, perceived screen time, perceived impact on sleep, productivity, friendships, mental health and self-esteem, and first-hand experience of cyberbullying. The research was reviewed and approved by external institutional review board Advarra. The lead authors are Michelle Faverio, Eugenie Park and Jeffrey Gottfried.
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From Pew Research Center · published 15/04/2026