Twitter's the burning compost heap, TikTok has the young generation's attention, but boomer-driven Facebook still rules the roost when it comes to numbers. Who's looking at what, and why is it all changing?
The social media platforms we know all too well may have started with humble beginnings, but they're now an omnipresent part of our lives.
And with battles between the platform powers brewing, which ones are people using the most, and how have they changed?
Oli Garside is the training and campaign manager for Mosh Social Media, an Auckland-based marketing agency. He's an expert on social media stats.
"Facebook's just shy of three million users in New Zealand, and there's 4.2 million social media users in total," he tells The Detail.
"That's a massive chunk. [Facebook] is by far and away the largest platform.
"I think you'll find it's a lot of the same people who were using it 10 to 15 years ago, but now they're 10 to 15 years older, so the far end of the demographic has kind of shifted – about 35 percent of the people on Facebook in New Zealand are over the age of 35, so a full third of those users, and probably the most prolific ones are in my parents' generation.
"Even just in terms of the fact that it's got so much scale, in terms of a marketing platform, it's one of the key ones that people still focus on."
Garside says tweens and teens are now using TikTok, a bit of Snapchat and Instagram.
"Three quarters of Instagram's users in New Zealand are under the age of 35. TikTok – under the age of 25 is two thirds of their user base."
Twitter is a bit more of a niche market – but Garside says it's grown in the past year, after (or in spite of) its controversial takeover by business magnate Elon Musk.
"They're seeing a bit of a resurgence at the moment while everybody logs back in to their old accounts to watch the house burn down. They have a self-reported increase of 43 percent in New Zealand," he says.
Threads has just been launched by Meta, the owners of Facebook, as a competitor to Twitter, leading to a few battles between Musk and Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg.
"You've got Elon Musk calling out Mark Zuckerberg for a cage match in the Colosseum, in Italy, then immediately backtracking on it because his Mum says he's not allowed to do it, which is even more hilarious," Garside says.
TikTok's also stirring up controversy due to its Chinese ownership, with New Zealand following other countries' leads in banning the app on parliamentary devices.
"There's genuine concern about how that data is treated, but it's interesting that TikTok has been the one they've been focusing on when historically all of these social media platforms have had issues with data protection."
Anna Rawhiti-Connell is head of audience and bulletin editor at The Spinoff. She's worked in the social media space for years and has kept a close eye on changing regulations across the world.
She says New Zealand could follow the likes of Canada and Australia to get big social media providers to pay for news content on their platforms – but this has meant controversy overseas.
"There's an element of a game of chicken here between governments and social media platforms in terms of pushing each other to the brink," she says.
"You've got track record in Australia, where the government legislated around social media companies paying for the right to show media content on their platforms – that got into some tricky territory because after the Australians passed this legislation, or were in the process of negotiating, for a couple of days Meta pulled all news media content off their platforms.
"New Zealand has just launched a proposal around online content regulation. Part of what they seem to be very hot on in that proposal is a bid to regulate social media platforms. Obviously those companies are subject to New Zealand law, but the tricky thing with social media platforms is that they're global.
"The internet to a certain extent is borderless and they're very large and influential."
Find out more about the changes afoot in social media by listening to the full episode.
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