Teenagers Prove Fickle When Choosing Social Networks



Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Over the last decade, teenagers have had several preferred social networks.

We know a lot about teenagers online. They ❤ emojis. They love GIFs — or “jifs,” depending on how you prefer to pronounce the word. And they love taking selfies.

While we know all this about today’s teenagers, pinning down where they want to share this content is much more difficult. Teenagers, it seems, are incredibly fickle with the social networks they want to become B.F.F.s with.

Last year, reports consistently found that they were not very interested in Twitter and instead were unhealthily addicted to Facebook. Now that seems to be flipping.

As Bianca Bosker of The Huffington Post wrote on Wednesday, Piper Jaffray’s semi-annual report on the habits of American teenagers, released this month, suggests that Twitter is a more important social network to teenagers than Facebook.

Researchers surveyed 8,650 teens with an average age of 16 and found that only 23 percent now see Facebook as the most important social network, down from 33 percent six months ago, and 42 percent last year.

But Facebook doesn’t have too much to worry about. While 16-year-olds might be abandoning the site, they are not traveling too far. Many are continuing to take their smartphone selfies and pictures of sunsets to Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

But why leave Facebook for its younger, less popular sister site?

Another report from Pew Research, published this year, said that teens were flocking to Instagram and Twitter because they found it easier to be open and expressive, which they said was more difficult on Facebook.

“Teens who used sites like Twitter and Instagram reported feeling like they could better express themselves on these platforms, where they felt freed from the social expectations and constraints of Facebook,” the report said.

The Pew report said that Twitter “has grown significantly” in 2012, with 24 percent of online teens now using Twitter, up from 16 percent in 2011.

But all of this doesn’t really mean much. Remember the social network MySpace? Well if you do, most teenagers today don’t.

A 2006 survey by Pew Research found that 85 percent of teenagers online had a MySpace account. Today, only 7 percent of teens maintain an account there.

So what’s a start-up to do? Often companies like Facebook and Twitter are caught between the conundrum of trying to increase the number of users on the service, but in doing so, they invite parents, which deter teenagers who don’t want to be seen socializing with a bunch of stuffy old people.

Or, as it was best summed up by a teenager interviewed in the Pew Research report: “Yeah, that’s why we go on Twitter and Instagram [instead of Facebook]. My mom doesn’t have that.”

Nick Bilton

New York Times

October 26, 2013.