“Teens are among the savviest people using social media, and whether it comes to civic engagement, activism, or their thoughts on a new movie, they want to be heard. So, starting today, people aged 13 through 17 will also have the choice to post publicly on Facebook,” said Facebook at the time. “While only a small fraction of teens using Facebook might choose to post publicly, this update now gives them the choice to share more broadly, just like on other social media services.”
It wasn’t long after that that a study from Piper Jaffray came out finding that Twitter has become more popular among teens than Facebook for the first time.
26% of teens, according to the study, preferred Twitter, compared to 23% for Facebook.
Given Twitter’s more public nature, you might agree with Facebook that kids just want to be heard, and to some extent, that’s probably true, but it’s only part of the story. Kids also increasingly don’t want to be heard by people they’re not talking to, and don’t want everything they do to remain on the web, preferring more communications with apps like Snapchat.
According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Facebook approached Snapchat about a possible acquisition for more than $1 billion (so more than it paid for Instagram), but the company declined.
That in itself is a pretty powerful statement on Snapchat and teen use. Facebook is losing interest from young people, and both Facebook and Snapchat know it.
Snapchat investor Bill Gurley said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, “For kids, the Internet is increasingly becoming a place that you can’t share, that you can’t have fun, that you can’t socialize in the way you want to. I think that’s really the essence of Snapchat. It’s a platform where they can communicate and have fun without any anxiety about the permanence. You hear about kids not getting jobs because of what’s on their Facebook page.”
Despite its challenges, Facebook still has plenty of teens, and probably will for the foreseeable future. Facebook simply has such a higher volume of users (including teens) than anything else, and that has to count for something.
AdAge put out a new report called, “Marketers: Facebook Still Has Way More Teens Than Anyone Else.” In it, they quote PayPal head of social media Dave Peck as saying:
“Find me a better network. You take half of what Facebook has, and it’s still more than anyone else has,” he said. “It’s not like I can advertise on Snapchat.”
Pew found in August that 94% of teens had Facebook profiles, compared to just 26% for Twitter.
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