Is Facebook losing its attraction to younger users?

With more than 900 million users, Facebook remains the most popular online hangout. But some younger people are turning their attention elsewhere. They are checking out new mobile apps, hanging out on Tumblr and Twitter, and sending text messages from their phones.  The table on the right is conducted by a market research company, Survata.  It shows that newer social networks are having an increasing market share among younger users.  Tumblr, which allows users to post multimedia short blogs, has been gaining a large number of younger users in recent years. 

Sociology Graduate Assistant Nathan Jurgenson says people actually choose the social networking sites that their friends are already on.  Therefore, peer influence encourages more and more youth to make similar choices.  

From Jurgenson's point, popularity creates a huge impact on people's choice.  Younger teens are more likely to be affected by their peers because they have a smaller social circle.  Teens have to follow their peers' activity in order to get involved in their social circle. This is why the population of teens switching to other social network sites is tremendous and has caused a movement toward newer social network sites such as Twitter and Tumblr.

Three reasons can explain the new trend in teens' social network choice.

Specialization develops a simpler and more direct interface. 
New social networking sites that are specialized in either text-status or visual elements have generated big differences from Facebook's traditional interface that combines articles, photos, videos, as well as plenty of ads.  Young people are increasingly favoring specialized social networking sites, typically those with a visual twist, which can get more teens hooked to them in 2013.  Snapchat, a photo messaging service that destroys sent images moments after they are received, is shuttling about 60 million pictures between phones per day, mostly from teenagers. Pheed, a Twitter-meets-Instagram-meets-YouTube hybrid social network that originally attracted creative types when it launched last fall, added a million new users in February, partially because teenagers started tweeting about the great visual experience it offers to them.  In addition, there is a growing number of teens who are interested in building up their own blogs.  Many teens state that a well-built blog could be a creative and natural representation of themselves and impress friends with their unique design and content.  In a word, teens are seeking some specialized words out of social media, such as photo, hash tag, and blog.  Thus, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat are becoming more attractive to young users because they are simple and convey information directly.

Young users tend to hide themselves from parents in order to protect their privacy.

College students are more used to having older people including family members, professors, and recruiters on their friend list because it is necessary to network with other parts of society for their future career.  However, it is not necessary for  younger teens.  As for the concern of privacy, part of Tumblr's success is no doubt due to the fact that it's a place where you can cultivate two or more identities, whereas on Facebook you're stuck with just one: the real you.  Since the population on Facebook is so big, people can easily develop hundreds of friends, including their teachers and parents.  According to the recent survey done by TopTenReviews, 43% of teens say they would change their online behavior if they knew that their parents were watching them; 39% think their online activity is private from everyone, including parents; 38% would feel offended if they found out their parents were spying on them with Facebook.  Teens feel that their parents are stalking them by checking their Facebook and commenting on most of their news feed, which limits their freedom of posting new content.  As parents seek newer methods of monitoring their children on Facebook, younger users are switching to newer social network sites that their parents have not joined yet.  

Teens are building up relationships with close friends rather than oversharing on Facebook.
Hundreds of photos from a recent vacation and status updates about an acquaintance amounted to bragging — force-feeding Facebook friends information they did not ask for.  Hence, they would like to filter out their close friends from their acquaintances to avoid receiving unnecessary news feed. Twitter, teens say, just feels more private and intimate. They can use pseudonyms or private locked accounts so their tweets stay between friends. Twitter also enables teens to have fun as a group, jumping on trending topics by means of using hash tags.  It seems they become more aware of whom they share life with and what they want to share.  Therefore, unlike older social network users who keep an eye on recruiters, professors and acquaintances in their friend list, teenagers spend less time on Facebook but browse Tumblr and Twitter more frequently to develop a closer relationship within small groups of friends.

Next wave of younger users might prefer a "ephemeral" experience in social networks.
Jurgenson states an idea about Snapchat regarding the creativity and variability of younger generation.  Snapchat allows online contents to be fleeting and temporary.  In other words, teens might feel that using Snapchat is more like a game since the content would not stay there for long and does not bring future effects. 

Jurgenson makes an interesting prediction regarding a trend in social networking innovation.  Since younger users are focused on specialization, controlled privacy, and closer relationships, Snapchat actually meets these needs.  On the mobile devices that have become so central to our lives, "ephemeral" apps like Snapchat have emerged as a private way for friends to share photos.  In the age where a sense of online privacy is very sacred, being able to communicate without leaving a permanent record is empowering.  Facebook might keep losing its attraction to younger users because they are seeking for a new way to communicate more than solely focusing on social networks.    

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