Will the new Facebook changes drive teenagers to use other social platforms?

March 20, 2013

Since its launch back in 2004, young teenagers have been some of Facebook’s biggest fans. However, as Facebook develops is it losing its attraction to many young teens, forcing them to discover new social platforms?

For example rather recently, Facebook announced plans to improve the layout of its home page including the following new features:

Bigger images – 50% of the news feed stories will consist of photos, emphasising visual imagery
Multiple feeds – users will have access to additional streams and content can be displayed based on the category it belongs to, not the person who posted it. For example, feeds for close friends, music, games etc
Mobile consistencies – more white space and a new navigation bar will be added as part of the new design.

These new updates suggest that the social network is concentrating more on the needs of businesses and older audiences, thus perhaps abandoning the teen market. By organising the vast array of content that exists on Facebook, users will spend more time on the site greatly benefiting marketers. Will this therefore drive away the teen crowd, forcing them to share information through other social platforms?

According to a recent survey of 1038 young adults the top five teen social networks used by 13-18 year olds were as follows:

Tumblr- 61%
Facebook- 59%
Twitter-22%
Instagram-21%
Snapchat – 13%

These findings suggest that Facebook is in fact doing just fine with the younger generation, but teens are choosing to spend more time on the microblogging social network service – Tumblr. A few teens claimed to prefer Tumblr for the pure fact that not everyone has an account. This suggests that as Facebook launches its most recent developments and attracts a wider audience, teenagers may begin to look for a cooler place to hang out online. Only time will tell if younger users will stick by the social network and carry on sharing information through Facebook.

Image courtesy of Pixabay under a Creative Commons 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication License

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