• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, Today

Legacy TV and movie discovery continue to see many benefits from social media -- in terms of marketing and content discovery.

At the same time, social media does much to serve its own content in terms of getting popular appeal and usage.

New research from S&P Global Market Intelligence finds young media consumers are served very well. Seventy-three percent of Gen Zers say they get better recommendations for TV and movies from social media than the broader online video-services platforms -- which can include those owned by legacy media companies.

Overall, 76% of Gen Zers also say “social media services create more content that is personalized for me than TV/video services.”

As expected, older boomers and seniors have a different behavior track -- although the trend is improving. Twenty-four percent say they get better recommendations on TV and movies from social media than other services and 32% get more personalized video content from social media than anywhere else.

In terms of daily time spent on social media, activity is still rising -- especially among Gen Zers, who spent 5.1 hours per day in the third quarter this year -- up from 4.5 hours in the first quarter of 2023.

At the other end of those audience demographics are boomers and seniors at 1.5 hours a day -- at nearly the same level (1.6 hours) in the first quarter of 2023.

Looking specifically at the percentage of social-media users and their different levels of time spent on services, 31% of TikTok users can spend more than two hours a day on the service -- higher than users on Facebook, Instagram, Discord and Pinterest.

By comparison, 16% of Facebook users spend two or more hours on services, compared to 9% with Pinterest. Roughly 50% of users spend less than an hour a day on non-TikTok social media.

S&P research comes from 2,500 respondents via a survey done in the third quarter of this year. For the individual social media research, 627 respondents were surveyed for TikTok compared to 1,593 for Facebook, 196 for Discord, 1,045 for Instagram and 412 for Pinterest.