Illinois' Favorite Social Media App May Surprise You

ILLINOIS — Ubiquitous social media is either the best thing since the transistor radio — you remember that, right? — or a sign that society is doomed because no one talks face-to-face anymore. Either way, in Illinois, we can’t get enough of the social media app Google+, if you can believe it.

That’s according to internet service provider CenturyLink, which looked at online data to determine which social media apps — Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest or Google+ — were most popular in each state. The results may surprise you.

Ubiquitous Facebook was the favorite in only about a dozen states. The overall winners are Snapchat — which younger social media users flocked to after Baby Boomers stole Facebook away from them — and Google Plus, the No. 1 social media app nationwide.

Google Plus?

“Trust us — we’re surprised by this data, too,” the study authors wrote

Google Plus, once touted as the next best thing since Facebook and maybe even the better thing, whimpered onto the social media scene a few years ago and was generally considered an expensive boondoggle. Facebook still far outsizes it — 2 billion users worldwide compared to 111 million for Google Plus — but increased social media queries may indicate a resurgence in popularity.

Ohio had more Google Plus searches than any other state, but it’s a winner in 13 other states as well. Here they are in order of the frequency of searches:

1. Ohio
2. California
3. Florida
4. Illinois
5. Maryland
6. Michigan
7. Minnesota
8. New Jersey
9. New York
10. North Carolina
11. Pennsylvania
12. Texas
13. Virginia
14. Washington

And, sorry Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you’re almost dead with Generation Z-ers — they’re also known as the iGeneration, because the internet has always existed in their worlds, and are just younger than millennials. They love Snapchat, especially in Mississippi. Here are the top states for Snapchat searches.

1. Mississippi
2. Arizona
3. Arkansas
4. Colorado
5. Georgia
6. Indiana
7. Iowa
8. Kansas
9. Kentucky
10. Massachusetts
11. New Mexico
12. Rhode Island
13. South Carolina
14. Tennessee

Pinterest is like Instagram and Tumblr in that it’s picture-based, but the ability to create boards that every user — not just followers — can view makes this a hit for DIYers and others looking for artistic inspiration. They’re pinning up a storm in South Dakota. Here’s how it all shook out for PInterest:

• South Dakota
• Connecticut
• Delaware
• Idaho
• Louisiana
• Missouri
• Montana
• Nebraska
• New Hampshire
• Oregon
• Utah
• Wisconsin

Perhaps there’s nothing left to learn about Facebook, so few people feel obliged to search for the nearly 15-year-old social media platform. Or maybe you’ve broken up with Facebook after troll farms in Russia posted bald-faced lies about the 2016 election. For whatever reason, it came in fourth in the analysis of social media Google searches.

It remains the top app in West Virginia, where the median age of Facebook users is around 42, but it’s also popular in Alaska, where the median age of users is 33, the second-lowest among Facebook users nationally. So, the study’s authors concluded, “could be just one of many factors explaining Facebook’s popularity in states that range from the northeast to the far edge of Canada.”

Here’s where Facebook is most popular:

1. West Virginia
2. Alabama
3. Alaska
4. Maine
5. North Dakota
6. Oklahoma
7. Vermont
8. Wyoming

Instagram, created in 2010 and acquired by Facebook four years later, was the least searched-for app. As Facebook searches trend downward, Instagram queries are down, too. Instagram is holding its own among users, which numbered 800 million last year. It’s most popular in Hawaii. Here’s the ranking:

1. Hawaii
2. Nevada
3. District of Columbia

In the study to detect geographic preferences for social media apps, CenturyLink used research from the online data gathering and marketing tool SimilarWeb and reviewed Google search terms to find which app searches were most popular.

Photo via Shutterstock