Which platforms matter
for your trade

A customer mentions TikTok. Your kid says nobody uses Facebook anymore. A marketing call promises Instagram will fill your schedule if you just post more.

None of them are lying, exactly. They're each looking at their own feed and mistaking it for the whole country.

Most of that advice comes from people who make their living posting — not from anyone who's ever had to leave a job halfway through to go do it.

The app that matters for your business isn't the one that's loudest this year. It's the one your customer already uses. That's a knowable thing, not a guess.

Who's actually there

Pew Research Center surveyed 5,022 US adults between February and June 2025. It's the newest complete read published as of July 2026.

A newer survey ran through June 2026 and came out July 14, 2026. Check for fresher numbers before you lean hard on any single percentage point from this page.

Overall: 84% of US adults use YouTube, 71% use Facebook, 50% use Instagram, 37% use TikTok, 32% use WhatsApp, 26% use Reddit.

Platform	18–29	30–49	50–64	65+
YouTube	95%	92%	85%	64%
Facebook	68%	80%	74%	57%
Instagram	80%	62%	40%	19%
TikTok	63%	44%	30%	12%
Snapchat	58%	31%	13%	4%
Reddit	48%	35%	16%	6%
X	33%	25%	16%	10%
WhatsApp	37%	40%	30%	20%

Look at the Facebook row twice. It doesn't fade with age the way Instagram does.

Facebook use peaks among adults ages 30-49, at 80%, higher than the 68% among adults 18-29. Instagram runs the other way: about 80% of adults 18-29 use it, against 19% of adults 65 and older.

Your customer probably owns the house

Here's the piece to be careful with, because it's an assumption this manual is making — not a number Pew handed us.

Pew measured people. The Census counts households. Different units, different surveys — this manual will not multiply them together to invent a figure that doesn't exist.

What it can do is set them side by side. Homeownership climbs steeply with age: from 36.8% of householders under 35 up to 78.4% of those 65 and over, against a national rate of 65.3%.

Instagram use runs the opposite direction of that curve. Facebook is used by a majority of adults in every age group.

So the practical point is narrow. Instagram largely misses older homeowners; Facebook reaches them. That is not the same as saying homeowners are mostly old — the middle-aged bands actually hold more of them. And Pew never counted homeowners at all. This is two different surveys, lined up side by side on purpose.

If most of your calls come from someone who owns the place you're standing in, that's the customer this page is built around. Whether real hours on Facebook turn into paid work is a separate question — the neighborhood-groups chapter runs that math.

The biggest one, and why we still skip it

The top row of that table wins outright: YouTube beats everything, in every age band — including 85% of adults 50-64 and 64% of adults 65 and over.

You won't find a video chapter in this manual. That's not because the people aren't there. The numbers say they are.

It's an hours call. Building anything worth watching takes a kind of time this manual doesn't assume a one-truck shop has to spare, on top of running the jobs.

Same reasoning covers Snapchat, Reddit, X, and WhatsApp. Real audiences, real numbers, no chapter here. Skipped on purpose, not because nobody's home.

Under all of it, one open question

There's a question under this whole page that no one has answered. We went looking for dated, independent research on whether people actually hire a tradesman through social media — versus just checking him out there before they call. We found none, and neither has Pew, as far as we can find; the platforms don't publish it either.

That distinction is the real question under "should I be on Facebook," and it stays open.

Every version of "how homeowners find a contractor" we could find traces back to a company that sells leads or advertising. This manual won't repeat those numbers. The outfit printing the stat has a reason to like the answer.

There's one exception, and it comes with real limits.

If you roof for a living, that's a real number, imperfect as it is. If you don't, it isn't yours to borrow.

Nextdoor's blank spot

There's a second platform with the same kind of hole in it: Nextdoor.

You'll see "13% of Americans use Nextdoor" repeated everywhere, including in places dated 2026. It's from Pew's 2021 report. Pew's current survey doesn't ask about Nextdoor at all — it covers 11 other platforms and skips it. There is no current, reliable number for how many Americans use it.

The one current Pew figure that even touches Nextdoor measures something else: in an August 2025 Pew survey, 6% of US adults said they regularly get news there, against 38% for Facebook. That's a reading habit, not a head count.

What Nextdoor actually offers a trade business, and how to claim and verify a page there, is its own chapter.

Picking without guessing

You don't have to be everywhere. You have to be where the person calling you already is — and now you have real numbers to check that against instead of a hunch.

Find your trade's typical customer in the table above. If most of your calls come from someone old enough to own the place — the assumption this page already named out loud — that points toward Facebook before Instagram.

If your work is visual — a finished panel, a clean install, the kind of job that looks good in a photo — Instagram earns a second look regardless of the age numbers.

Whatever you pick, whether the time is worth it is a separate question, and it isn't this page's job to answer.