Social media preferences differ between grade levels

by Neil Bai and Shania Wang

Social media remains a popular outlet of internet usage amongst students. However, the usage of social media differs between the four upper school grades.

A poll sent out to students revealed that freshman and juniors preferred Instagram and Snapchat while Sophomores used Facebook the most. Seniors used Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook evenly.

Some freshmen rarely use any social media. Ashwin Reddy (9), who has Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook accounts, spends little to no time on social media daily.

“I rarely use any [social media accounts],” Ashwin said. “If I’m feeling very exuberant, maybe ten minutes. Otherwise, zero minutes.”

Amongst all grades, Instagram and Snapchat were the most popular.

“I use different social media for different things,” Evan Lohn (12) said. “Snapchat for pictures and Facebook for chatting with people for a long time.”

The most common reason for using social media is communicating with friends. The class Facebook pages for the Class of 2019 has 65 members, compared to the 127 members for the Class of 2018 and 165 members for the Class of 2017’s page.

“I use [Facebook] to interact with my friends,” Neha Tallapragada (9) said.

Senior Shilpa Repakula enjoys using Snapchat because it is a casual way of interacting with friends.

“I used [Snapchat] mostly to communicate with each other,” she said. “If I see something cool, rather than taking a picture of something that doesn’t really matter but is interesting, I could just send it to someone else.”

Many students use more than one outlet equally as another due to the different features and benefits of each.

“I like to use the messaging on Facebook and you know, Instagram can’t message but there are like really nice shoes on Instagram,” Junior Jordan Goheen, who uses Facebook and Instagram equally, said.

Students across all grades spread out the amount of time spent they spend on social media throughout the course of the day.

“I don’t do it just in one period of time, I like do it in between,” freshman Tiffany Zhao said. “Whenever I’m on my phone I just check Instagram for like one minute.”