Teenagers stick with Facebook

Warc, 27 June 2014

SAN FRANCISCO: Contrary to received wisdom over recent months that US teenagers have been abandoning Facebook for other social media networks, new research has revealed that Facebook remains their favourite social network.

Of the 4,517 US teenagers aged 12 to 17 questioned by Forrester Research, more than three-quarters said they still use Facebook and nearly half said they were using the social site more than they were a year ago.

Only YouTube recorded a higher rate of youth adoption, although it is used less frequently than Facebook and Instagram.

US teenagers who use Facebook were asked how often they use the service and it emerged that close to one-third (28%) said they use it "all the time", a higher rate than any other social site.

Indeed, Facebook is accessed twice as much by young users as Pinterest, Tumblr or Snapchat, said Forrester analyst Nate Elliott, and has more users than Instagram and WhatsApp combined.

"Since Facebook's CFO admitted in 2013 that young teens were visiting the site slightly less frequently, most marketers have accepted as fact that teens are fleeing the site en masse. But that's simply not true," he said, in comments reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook-owned Instagram came second for the amount of time teenagers spent on a social network, followed by Snapchat, Twitter, Vine and WhatsApp, which Facebook is in the process of acquiring.

The Forrester Research, also carried out by analyst Gina Fleming, forecast that more teenagers will use Facebook in the future as smartphone adoption increases.

"As today's 12- and 13-year-olds grow into 16- and 17-year-olds, it's likely their Facebook adoption will increase further," Elliott and Fleming said.

Data sourced from Forrester Research, Wall Street Journal; additional content by Warc staff