A Pew Research Center survey has found that many people, especially teens, are continuing to get tired of Facebook. Many of them are spending less time on the social media site moving to alternative options like Twitter and even Google +. There were many reasons given by the teens in the survey, including the fact that Facebook isn’t ‘cool’ anymore because parents and grandparents are now using the site in great numbers. Other reasons given for moving away from Facebook include that their friends are sharing too much information, the endless ‘Facebook Drama’.
It is no surprise that this downtick in Facebook is not an indication that kids are spending more time in the great outdoors, however.
The survey also found that there the number of teens using Twitter went up by 16% (to 24%) since 2011. There were also significant increases in the usage of other social platforms including Instagram, Tumblr and others. YouTube and Snapchat have also seen significant growth in the past 18 months.
Teens say that these other social platforms allow them to express themselves better and that they don’t like many of the constraints of Facebook. Despite these problems, however, most teens still use Facebook on a regular basis as it continues to be the most popular social network in the US with over 1.1 Billion global users.
Despite the Pew Research survey, Facebook executives are still saying that their popularity is remaining steady or even growing. They claim that the fact that teens are spending significantly more time on other social networks does not mean they are leaving Facebook. They believe teens are simply spending more total time per day on a wide range of different sites.
Whatever is happening, there is little doubt that teens are not dedicated exclusively to Facebook like they once were. The average teen, however, does have about 300 ‘friends’ on Facebook and only around 79 ‘followers’ on Twitter so there is clearly still a major gap in favor of Facebook.
