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Facebook Is No Longer the Most Popular Social Network for Teens
- ffrryuu 13y agoThat's because all the parents are on it.
- skwirl 13y agoThe chart shows a huge jump in "Other," from 4% to 17% in just six months. I wish they explained that. Vine?
- angryasian 13y agoYeah I imagine vine and snapchat are the two biggest growth social networks.
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- elorant 13y agoSnapchat is one. Especially in the youngsters it's usage is rising pretty fast.
- ffrryuu 13y agoReddit
- selmnoo 13y agoReddit is a social bookmarking site, not a social networking site. The focus is on the content, not the user.
- lukejduncan 13y agoI was really surprised to see Reddit called a "bookmarking site" however Google tells me you're not alone in calling it that. Is it really bookmarking? It seems so different than, say, Delicious is/was.
- ffrryuu 13y agoFacebook and friend are losing content, then you lose people, then you are finished.
- ma2rten 13y agoIn Asia (at least here in Thailand) I think LINE is quickly overtaking all other social networks. It's sort of like What's App, but with much more functionality.
- Achshar 13y agoThey have huge advertising campaign going on here in India with top bollywood stars. I would still be surprised if they were doing good here. Why is there still a market for internet messengers? There are so many of them already. it's like image sharing apps.
- ma2rten 13y agoOk, here is what I have observed so far (I don't use Line myself): 1. Line works with your telephone number (if you have someones number you can send them a message) 2. Line allows you to send messages (free sms) and voice calls. 3. Line allows you to have friend groups. But there also reasons specific to Asia (at least Thailand): 1. Line has a "cute look" and has smilie packs which you can buy (big images actually). Thais seem to love that. Westerners would probably find them childish. 2. Line has status messages. These seems to be used in quite an interesting way: to tell people something which you don't really want to tell them directly, e.g. "Stop being jealous. Change your life to make other people jealous.".
- amplification 13y agoI find Silicon Valley's obsession with teens fascinating. Why is teen usage a benchmark for the health of a startup? Do teenagers spend money online? Is there any research on that?
- ra88it 13y agoTeens represent the near future. They'll grow up and maybe carry their allegiances forward.
- amplification 13y agoI think this article proves that wrong (if these stats are true). Teens are the most fickle demographic out there!
- ollysb 13y agoIf services only remain at their peak for 4/5 years this doesn't represent much of an advantage.
- AJ007 13y agoThe question is, does Facebook behave like Google, or even more generally, like e-mail, and last a long time, or is it just another 4-5 year fad? If its a longer term tool then the behavioral trends of young demographics are a big deal.
- scopendo 13y agoMaybe - though my guess is that they'll join a university population and/or workforce and start interacting with the wider world, that just happens to be significantly on Facebook. But at 40 mine is hardly a relevant opinion :)
- amplification 13y agoMy guess is they'll join university & the workforce, and then they'll join the world's most popular social network: email. ;)
- dboyd 13y agoTried to signup for facebook several times today and it kept asking for my phone number. I wonder if teens are less willing to go through that hassle. Compare that to twitter's new onboarding experience, which is (arguably) very well done.
- alex_doom 13y agoNo they don't want to hang out on the same place their mom is. They have accounts but they sit idle.
- tankbot 13y agoUm, since Instagram is Facebook, by my estimate Facebook owns 46% of that graph and is still most popular by a long-shot.
- 67726e 13y agoIf you want to get pedantic, then the Facebook corporation is the most popular social network corporation. We're talking about platforms here, not the parent company.
- presty 13y agoI find it a little bit hard to believe that tumblr is only 4% and that Google+ is 3%. I highly doubt the veracity of these numbers.
- devindotcom 13y agoIt's great that young people are diversifying in this way, but isn't it a little apples to oranges? You don't use Facebook to send disappearing images to each other, you don't use Instagram to plan events or remind you of birthdays, and you don't use Snapchat to share pictures of your cat with followers around the world. They're very different things, yet they are all lumped into the category "social network" because you can make connections with people. By that standard, practically any online service or platform these days is a social network! Still, it's very significant that Facebook is not the go-to thing for lots of online connective tasks (even if they do own Instagram). People don't want all their interactions to be on one platform for the same reason no one puts all their eggs in the same basket, and in addition, there are nicer baskets out there to try out!
- meowface 13y agoAbsolutely. It is a complete misunderstanding if they're considering services like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat as somehow mutually exclusive. You can only really compare Facebook with services like Google+, Myspace, and Orkut; and even then, many people have active accounts on multiple of those services.
- twiceaday 13y agoIsn't that how it starts though? It is no longer possible to disrupt Facebook on its terms. You have to offer something completely different at first then slowly add Facebooks key features to provide a smooth transition.
- ryanmerket 13y agoIs there a precedent you're referring to? Because I believe all of the above social networks started as... social networks.
- Retric 13y agoI thought Facebook stared as as a hot or not clone for Harvard students.
- kbenson 13y agoThe other night at dinner my eleven year old daughter asked me "What's instagam?" and then proceeded to ask if she could have an account because all her friends were on it. I told her no because I don't like the idea of her on a social network yet (and it's probably against their TOS anyway). Truthfully, I don't know why there isn't a K-12 social network that has schools and teachers, and kids were grouped by class, and teachers could moderate all posts and (have the option to) see all messages (with a notice to the parties that it had been looked at). That would alleviate any concerns I had about inappropriate content, and online bullying (there's a record, kids would be accountable for what was said), and provide immediate benefit to students and parents (who could maybe have accounts that were read-only for public discussions and their own children's correspondence). Edit: As numerous replies have pointed out, there apparently is one, edmodo.com. I guess it's just not used around (or at least not in my district).
- alex_doom 13y agoBecause kids would never use it. They like their hidden caves. It's similar to passing secret notes to each other in class. Except now they can do it from afar.
- kbenson 13y agoOh, they would use it if it was a valuable resource for asking for help with homework, communicating with other students and teachers, the only way to contact some of their friends (which aren't allowed on other networks), or in any way mandated. Parents would like it for the control it offered, and kids aren't in total control of their choices. Kids might also want and indeed use other social networks, but I would feel much more comfortable as a parent telling them no if I knew they had this to fall back on.
- PeterisP 13y agoChicken and egg problem - they wouldn't be really active ther because they don't want to, and because noone is really active, then it wouldn't be a valuable resource for homework and communicating with other students. I've seen a large implementation (around 1/3 schools in my area) that technically could do all that, but you can only 'mandate' a horse to the water but can't make it drink - in the end, they were used for parents to look up grades communicate with teachers, while kids used only the absolutely practical things rarely, and since they couldn't be mandatory (as not 100% can afford a computer at home) it sort of died out. It would be fun to ask the developers what percent of kids sent even a single message to another kid... All at the same time, the ten year olds are extremely active online elsewhere.
- baddox 13y ago> Twitter has overtaken Facebook as the social media network that is most important to teens, according to Piper Jaffray's semi-annual teen market research report. Twitter is the new king of teens, with 26 percent naming it as their "most important" social site. (emphasis mine)
- frostmatthew 13y ago> Only 23 percent said Facebook was most important (emphasis mine) A difference of ~3 points in a group as fickle as teenagers isn't very significant.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoFacebook had monopoly once and now it has less than quarter.
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- mohamedzahid 13y agoI just wanted to point out: Instagram + Facebook = 46%
- kunai 13y agoSocial networks: the best way to waste time ever invented in the history of history. I never saw a need for any of them. Twitter had potential, but it got overrun by people who somehow felt the need to rant about their opinions on political decisions without being completely educated about any of them, by celebrities, by people who can't spell, and by people who think that @messages are the perfect way to privately communicate on the internet. I really don't see Snapchat lasting for longer than a year. The others will stay around for a while, but then eventually fade into irrelevance... like all trends that don't provide palpable services, e.g. Google et des autres fournisseurs de recherches.
- devx 13y agoAlso a very nice way for everyone to create their own dossiers, that most law enforcement agencies can access even without a warrant these days, and can even collect en masse.
- frostmatthew 13y agoHave teenagers ever been an important group for Facebook? It started for college students only, thus for the first few years the only other age group it could expand to were people who started using it in college and continued to do so as they got older. My assumption would be from there it spread to/through friends and coworkers (most of which would be past their teens).
- clubhi 13y agoOne thing is for sure. Teenagers are no longer the most popular demographic for Facebook.
- lchitnis 13y agoFacebook is becoming more unpopular among other groups, as well. I am tempted to say that everyone is getting sick of Facebook. Many of my friends now have a love/hate relationship with it, trying to make a higher quality experience by shaving down their friends' lists or just deleting their profile altogether. I feel Facebook burnout as well...it's this thing I have to do compulsively, which offers no joy, yet it's where everyone is, so I don't really have a choice but to go there to keep in touch with everyone...and I think that is the general sentiment these days at least among my mid-30s peer group...many of whom don't bother checking their page anymore...
- dcsommer 13y agoI'm curious if that is a function of how Facebook works or if that is what naturally happens when you see everyone you know online doing fun things (which would apply to every social network of that size).
- lchitnis 13y agoNot sure, but I believe in the law of diminishing returns...after a while, a human being gets used to something, and eventually sick of it after repeated exposure.
- ma2rten 13y agoIt seems as if Zuckerberg (fore)saw this trend. This explains why he paid such a hefty price for Instagram.
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- dschiptsov 13y agoYeah, yeah, IPO is coming, we know.
- morgante 13y agoTo be clear, this doesn't mean teens aren't using Facebook. It just means they don't call Facebook their "most important" social network. That's a huge difference: more teens are likely still using Facebook than Twitter, they just don't consider it their most important social network. This means Facebook has essentially reached utility status, which is reflected anecdotally in my life. It's replaced email for a generation. But that's arguably a fine place for them to be: if you own the entire backbone of people's communications, there's a lot of money to be made in that. You'll find a lot more teens who use Facebook but not Twitter than the inverse. To put it another way, if asked I'd say Hacker News is "more important" to me than Google Search. But Google definitely makes a lot more (potential) money off me.
- vasilipupkin 13y agoHacker News is more important to you than Google Search ? sorry, that cracked me up
- morgante 13y agoYup. :) For one thing, HN doesn't really have any viable alternatives at this point. Google has plenty.
- playhard 13y agoIt is true https://twitter.com/search?q=uses%20AND%20facebook&src=typd&f=realtime https://twitter.com/search?q=uses%20AND%20facebook&src=typd&...