A new survey shows that Snapchat is still the favorite social platform among Gen Z — but it's not the app teens are using the most (SNAP)

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Snapchat remains the favorite social platform among teens, a survey from Piper Jaffray shows.
The survey reports that while Snapchat was the favorite social platform, Instagram beat out Snapchat in monthly users among Gen Zers.
Despite these numbers, Snapchat's number of daily active users is continuing to fall, and has been long-surpassed by Instagram.

Even as Snapchat's user base continues to shrink, it's still cited among teens as their favorite platform, according to a new survey of Gen Zers.

Of the 8,000 teens surveyed by investment firm Piper Jaffray, 41% named Snapchat as their favorite social platform.

But Snapchat's lead as the favorite social platform is down 5% from Piper Jaffray's previous survey done in Fall 2018. Even though Snapchat is still No. 1 as the favorite, more of the teens surveyed use Instagram (84%) more regularly than Snapchat (81%).

Instagram is only a few percentage points behind Snapchat as teens' favorite social platform, and Snapchat's lead continues to shrink with each Piper Jaffray biannual survey.

The growth of Instagram among teens mirrors Instagram's dominance over Snapchat overall. While Snapchat's number of daily active users has shrunk down to 186 million, Instagram's user base is continuing to grow, and has surpassed 500 million.

Instagram has also become the place where teens prefer to engage with brands. Instagram recently bet big in this area by adding in-app shopping, a sector that some analysts have said could generate $10 billion in revenue by 2021.

The survey also asked teens about their favorite influencers on various platforms. On Instagram, these included Kylie Jenner and James Charles, who have 131 million and 15.2 million followers, respectively, and are influential in the beauty world. Piper Jaffray found that 80% of female teens are using online influencers as a starting point to discover new beauty trends, so it's easy to see how Instagram has become such a major part of teens' time spent online.

The survey spelled bad news for Instagram's parent company, Facebook, however. The site's popularity among teens is continuing to dwindle, with only 36% of teens reporting that they use Facebook at least once per month, compared with 52% who said they use it monthly back in fall 2016.

Twitter and Pinterest were also in the ranks, but way behind Instagram and Snapchat. The report shows that 44% of teens said they use Twitter at least once per month, while only a quarter of those surveyed say they use Pinterest.

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