Facebook's Loss with Teenagers

In a recent report on Facebook’s analytics with their users, it has been discovered that Facebook’s users between age 12 and 17 fell by 9.9 percent last year, which is a loss of 1.4 million users. When I first saw this, I was surprised; Facebook was one of the earliest social media platforms to be popularized and is the most popular one to date. It was the site that made social media a regular thing for people to spend time doing and gave birth to a new revolution of online content. I can remember being 12 and people in my sixth grade class were lying about their age so they could make an account. Facebook started as a platform mostly used by teenagers and young adults in order to stay connected with their peers. It was essentially a new and improved MySpace for kids in middle and high school. It started off as a platform to share statuses and life updates with family and friends and slowly moved to a focus on photo and video sharing. That is when a different generation of people joined the platform: parents. 

When I was in high school, if there was a day I didn’t see my mom on Facebook, I would often get confused. Like most moms, you could always find mine scrolling through her feed no matter if she had already seen all the posts or not. After awhile, I was getting tagged in pictures less by my friends and more by my mom. I think this speaks volumes on how Facebook’s users have changed over the past five years because of the different platforms that have gained popularity. With the rise of platforms like Instagram and Twitter, Facebook lost it’s status among the young generation. Although it worked to keep up with the young adults, Facebook has not kept them on the platform. With my generation, Facebook is now known as not as important as other platforms because of the failure to keep up. 

Yet, at the same time, Facebook has done a fantastic job at keeping the older generations engaged on the platforms by focusing their appeal to them. Because of the reputation that Facebook now has, the people who run it are now focusing on that group of people who are still interested. That is where they are losing all of their younger users: they know who is using it and are targeting them. But they have encountered some problems along the way, especially involving the recent presidential election. Facebook did a poor job at preventing fake news from showing up on people’s feeds, along with supposed interference with the election. Although this didn’t affect the older users from staying on the platform, it has affected their performance among young adults. 10 percent is a large portion of users for Facebook to use, specifically with the teenagers that have dropped it as a popular media outlet. Yet, even with this drop, Facebook is still the most popular platform by a long shot, which shows how many people are truly apart of the social media world. Despite the criticism that the younger generation receive about their use of social media, it is just as bad among adults. 

Facebook has not and probably will not take a serious blow with this information being released because of their recent buying of Instagram. Although the popularity of Facebook is decreasing with people my age, it sure is doing well with parents and it is still the best platform for businesses to use.