Data from a number of surveys suggests that teenagers are leaving social networks like Facebook in favor of social apps.
The latest study comes from Project Tomorrow, a non-profit organization focused on digital technology for education, which recently released the results of its 2013 survey of 325,279 K-12 students across the U.S.
According to the Project Tomorrow survey, in 2013, just 30% of middle school students 39% of high school students said they are maintaining a profile on a social networking site (read: Facebook). That’s a decrease of approximately 40% since 2009, the report notes. The drop in social network use has been accompanied by a rise in social apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine, which are now used by 44% of students in grades 6-12.
- Text messaging is also on the rise, according to Project Tomorrow, used by two thirds of students in grades 6-12 in 2013, up 37% from 2008.
- 28% of middle school students said they are making and posting videos.
- 12% said they have their own blog.
- 38% of this age group said they stream online TV shows.
- 23% of middle school students regularly play massively multi-player online games.
As noted, these data echo the results of some other surveys.
- Piper Jaffray Teen Survey - Last week I wrote about a survey of 7,500 teens by Piper Jaffray which found that 30% of teens ranked Instagram their most important social network, ahead of Twitter at 27% and Facebook at 23%. These are all big changes from the results of a previous Piper Jaffray survey a year ago, when 33% of teen respondents chose Facebook as their most important social network, compared to 30% for Twitter and just 17% for Instagram.
- iStrategyLabs Facebook Teen Survey - In January 2014, drawing on data from Facebook’s social advertising platform, iStrategyLabs found that the number of Americans ages 13-17 using Facebook declined 25.3% from 13.1 million in January 2011 to 9.8 million in January 2014, while the number of users ages 18-24 declined 7.5% from 45.4 million to 42 million over the same period.
- USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future and Bovitz, Inc. - This teen survey found that roughly one in three (30%) Facebook users believe they will be using the service less within the next five years. Within this group, 40% say they use Twitter, while Instagram is also growing fast, especially among millennials.
COMMENTARY:
Here's Where Teens Are Going Instead of Facebook
In November 2013, Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Ebersman confirmed a worrying, but long-suspected trend for the world’s biggest social network: teenagers, perhaps the most important demographic for a modern-day communication tool, were becoming less active on the site.
Ebersman admitted, referring to usage numbers from the second to third quarters of 2013.
“We did see a decrease in daily users, partly among younger teens.”
Researchers at GlobalWebIndex, a syndicated study on digital consumers in 32 markets, recently confirmed this decline.
Having surveyed teenagers in 30 countries, they revealed that the number of teenagers claiming to be active on Facebook (ie. doing more than just “liking” a separate page on the web) had dropped to 56% in the third quarter of 2013, from 76% in the first.
The biggest decline in active usage (by 52%) was in the Netherlands; there was a 16% fall for American teens.
Where are they going instead? Not surprisingly, it’s mobile chat services like WeChat, and photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Snapchat.
What’s truly startling though, is how quickly global teenagers are taking up the services instead:
Click Image To Enlarge
The latest research from GlobalWebIndex, out Tuesday and with the accompanying graphic above, shows that Chinese messaging platform WeChat has seen the most rapid growth in active users aged between 16 and 19 — by an incredible 1,021% — between the first and second quarters of this year.
The other big wins have been for video sharing app Vine, owned by Twitter, and the mobile app for photo-sharing app Flickr. Active teen users for Vine grew by 639% and for Flickr by 254%, according to research group’s estimates.
The ephemeral photo-sharing app Snapchat is also growing strong; GlobalWebIndex only recently began surveying its use, but have already surmised that 10% of teens globally are using the service, making it bigger than Pinterest, Vine, WeChat, Line and LinkedIn among that demographic.
Tom Smith, CEO of GlobalWebIndex, said.
“There is a very clear story with the big winners being closed messaging and video-and-photo sharing apps. This is something that could be particularly harmful to Facebook because its core value lies in peer-to-peer community, messaging and photo sharing.”
Even Facebook Messenger is seeing more active usage (an 86% increase), than Facebook itself, where teenage active users fell by 17% in the same period, according to the estimates. Instagram saw an 85% increase in active users and messaging tool WhatsApp saw an 81% growth. Tumblr also saw some growth in active users, but by a relatively-low 30%.
Smith said.
“There is a clear, definitive shift to mobile in general, underlined by a large rise in Facebook’s mobile app, [up 69%], so the composition of Facebook is changing.”
The teen trend towards mobile chat apps should have less of an impact on Twitter, Smith added, because Twitter plays a greater role in accessing real-time news, interacting with TV or following celebrities. Even Google seems to be better insulated than Facebook because it is associated with broader networks and content.
Despite the huge growth in active users of WeChat, most teens in the U.S. and Western Europe still aren’t using it, though anecdotally, it is said to be popular among young people in Chinese communities. The real growth for the service is in China, where WeChat is based, and parts of South East Asia. The messaging app, which claims more than 250 million monthly active users, is owned by the Chinese Internet giant Tencent, which claims 800 million active users for its instant messing service for desktops. WeChat is the English-language version of the company’s original Chinese-language chat app, WeiShin.
Tencent President Martin Lau while on stage at the GMIC mobile conference in San Francisco in October 2013, adding that Tencent was customizing WeChat for local audiences in each country.
“We launched different branding and different back-end servers in other locations.”
Lau, who was previously one of the key bankers at Goldman Sachs that helped take Tencent public in 2004, said WeChat was targeting Italy, Mexico and Brazil as key areas for expansion, and that the U.S. was “a tough market.”
He added.
“But we do have an office here and a team who are trying to think about how we can do [things] differently in the U.S..”
How is WeChat capitalizing on its popularity with teenage users? One way is by setting up physical vending machines, selling soft drinks. It’s all part of a broader experiment by Tencent to set up a payment mechanism within WeChat. Tencent partner Ubox recently set up 300 WeChat vending machines in Beijing’s subway stations where WeChat users could get discounted drinks by paying with their chat app.
Lau said.
“Those are experiments at this point, but over time as the mobile Internet ties in with people’s lives more closely there will be more opportunities.”
Still, Lau doesn’t see mobile messaging platforms like WeChat canabailizing social networks like Facebook in the same way social networks ate through instant messaging. Mobile messaging through platforms like WhatsApp or KakaoTalk involve communicating with a smaller group of people that end users typically already know in real life; they’re privy to their mobile numbers after all.
He said.
“They’re both social, but address two very different user cases. They can actually coexist.”
NOTE: In a blog post dated February 20, 2014, we reported that Facebook had acquired text messaging app Whatsapp for the phenomenal price of $16 billion in stock and cash. The move to acquire Whatsapp was prompted by a decline in Facebook usage by teens who were spending their time on Whatsapp. This was a protective strategy to recapture those teens even if it meant acquiring Whatsapp for quite a premium.
Courtesy of an article dated April 14, 2014 appearing in MediaPost Publications The Social Graf and an article dated November 12, 2013 appearing in Forbes
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