PAST ITS SELL-BY
Kids are all flight from Facebook to cooler sites
Teens are unfriending Facebook in droves as they move to cooler social media platforms, a new study says.
The percentage of American 13-to-17-year-olds on Mark Zuckerberg’s social network now sits at 51 percent, down from 71 percent in 2015.
The new numbers come from a Pew Research survey of teens and technology use, which found that Facebook now trails significantly behind Instagram and Snapchat — which 72 and 69 percent of teenagers say they use, respectively.
It was a 38 percent jump for Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, and a 68 percent pop for Snapchat.
The most popular platform for the age group, however, was the video streaming site YouTube, which 85 percent of teens said they use for music and video.
The dip wasn’t unexpected for Facebook — the social network has struggled to stay relevant with younger audiences as their parents signed up to monitor their children’s social presence and stayed after the kids moved on to the visual nature of Snapchat and Instagram’s picturebased services.
Facebook has attempted to stay relevant by cribbing popular features such as “stories” from Snapchat, but it has done little to move the needle.
The survey found that Facebook was popular among lower-income teens, with 70 percent of them living in households earning less than $30,000 using Facebook. Only 36 percent of teens in households that brought in more than $75,000 used the platform.
Pew’s survey reported that nearly half of the teens they surveyed say they are using the internet “almost con- stantly,” up from 24 percent in 2015, while 90 percent go online multiple times a day.
But despite being online all day, every day, teens are divided on whether or not their relationships with social media are a good thing. Pew found that 45 percent of teens were neutral about social media’s presence in their lives, while 31 percent called it positive, and 24 said it is negative.
Facebook shares closed up 1.2 percent Friday afternoon, to $193.99.