71% of Irish Adults Enjoy Using Facebook And Instagram

Facebook is Ireland’s most popular social media platform, but preferences vary greatly by demographic.

Social media advertising is a relatively new marketing channel but it’s still one of the most diverse. There are various channels, targeting methods and extremely picky users how love and hate different platforms. In an effort to make sense of it all, Wolfgang Digital surveyed over one thousand Irish internet users asking “Which network do you most enjoy spending time on?”.

Facebook Rules the Roost
Facebook has had a pretty rough right of it this year after staring 2018 with advertiser-unfriendly algorithm changes dropping organic reach by 34% . That was followed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw millions of peoples’ data compromised.

Regardless, Ireland still considers Facebook to be the country’s favourite social media with 46% of respondents saying they enjoy spending time on the platform most.

What some might find surprising is Instagram’s rise into second place with 24% of public opinion on their side, ahead of Twitter’s 20%.

Diving Deeper
While Facebook is Ireland’s favourite platform overall, diving into the figures showed diverse taste across various demographics.

Instagram took the top spot for people aged between 18 and 34. Facebook reclaims the top spot for people aged 35 to 54 where Instagram dropped to third place behind Twitter.

Mark Zuckerberg is a Happy Man
Despite a very difficult first half of 2018, Mark Zuckerberg is likely quite happy with how his properties, Facebook and Instagram, are performing. Together, 71% of Irish people we surveyed stated they enjoyed spending time on these two social platforms.

In a year which showed data breaches to be Facebook’s weakness, the volume of data available for advertisers across Facebook and Instagram might very well be their greatest strength.

Senior Social Client Lead, Sarah Grogan, crunched the numbers for this research and believes

”The data shows what we already suspected – channel usage varies greatly depending on the demographic you are targeting. We shouldn’t assume any channel is relevant or irrelevant to our target audience without doing the research.”

More data and insights regarding Sarah’s research are available on The Wolfgang Blog.