Teens flee Facebook for Twitter, Instagram
People under 19 love Apple, but the Apple Watch? Forget it.
Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images
New research from investment bank Piper Jaffray says less than half of U.S. teenagers now use Facebook.
Since children are the
future, and no one over 21 really knows what the demographic finds
“cool,” researchers have devoted many, many surveys to the exact
quantification of what it is #teens do online.
In May 2013, they were fleeing Facebook’s “drama.” A year later, they flocked back to the network like lost sheep.
Now, a dramatic report
from Piper Jaffray — an investment bank with a sizable research arm —
rules that the kids are over Facebook once and for all, having fled Mark
Zuckerberg’s parent-flooded shores for the more forgiving embraces of
Twitter and Instagram. Between spring and fall of this year (Piper
Jaffray conducts its Taking Stock with Teens surveys semiannually),
Facebook use among teenagers aged 13 to 19 plummeted from 72 per cent to
45 per cent. In other words, less than half of the teenagers surveyed
said “yes” when asked if they use Facebook.
Surveys of this type
are, of course, a dime a dozen, and teen whims are as volatile as
Twitter’s trending hashtags. That said, Piper Jaffray’s research is
thorough: It surveyed a group of 7,200 U.S. students, average age 16,
and accounted for variables such as gender and household income. They
are not poor kids: 2,200 of those asked have an average household income
of $109,000 (U.S.) and the rest are close to the middle of the U.S.
income distribution, with a $56,000 household income.
Among the survey’s
other findings: Teenagers are looking forward to the Apple Watch about
as much as they wanted a U2 album forcibly included in their music
libraries.
The teens love Apple:
67 per cent own an iPhone, compared with 61 per cent in the spring wave,
and 73 per cent expect their next phone to be an iPhone. Among tablet
owners, 66 per cent have an iPad. Android is losing popularity: only 19
per cent want their next phone to run it, down from 24 per cent in
April.
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Yet only 16 per cent
would be interested in buying an Apple Watch for $350 (U.S.). They are
not put off by the price tag: They just don’t understand why they need a
watch of any kind, even one made by a company they know and respect. In
2012, a study showed only 32 per cent of millennials wear a watch all
the time, though 71 per cent own one. That was the previous generation,
born in the 1980s and 1990s. Generation Z-ers, born since the late
1990s, use a phone for most things, including telling time and showing
off. The Piper Jaffray study shows the most popular watch brand among
them is Rolex, not that they actually own one or want to.
Piper Jaffray says the
relative lack of interest in an Apple Watch among this age group
supports its cautious projection of the gadget’s 2015 sales — a mere 10
million units. That volume would still make billions of dollars for
Apple, but the company clearly faces an uphill battle for the younger
consumers with its long-awaited product.
The teen flight from
Facebook is definitely not a statistical quirk: Other major networks
have mostly held their own, and Instagram has jumped from 69 per cent to
76 per cent. Mark Zuckerberg’s foresight in buying Instagram has proved
amazingly precise: 38 per cent of teens say Instagram would be the best
marketing channel to reach them.
Facebook, however,
isn’t really monetizing Instagram yet. “We’re starting slow,” a notice
on the service’s website tells potential advertisers. “We’ll let you
know when we’re ready to expand to more ad partners.” Perhaps once
Instagram becomes as cynically ad-infested as Facebook, with its
self-launching videos and questionable experiments on users, Generation Z
will also vote with its feet. These social network users are more
reticent than social networks’ early adopters: They are unwilling to
give up as much personal information, and in many cases they’d rather
stay anonymous.
Both research and
anecdote suggest that the teen flight from Facebook also has something
to do with the presence of adults on the site, as well as the typically
high-school plagues of oversharing and in-fighting. The recent rise of
anonymous social apps — things like Whisper and Yik Yak, which is
dominated by college students — would also seem to suggest a youthful
wish to escape the confines and responsibilities of a fixed online
identity. (Facebook certainly seems to worry that’s the case: On Tuesday
New York Times reported that the Web site was working on an anonymous,
stand-alone messaging app of its own.)
That should perhaps
worry parents, of both the helicopter and cool-dad variety: You can’t
really interact with — or “check up on” — your kids on Whisper the way
you do on ye olde FB. (Whisper users don’t have friends and go on under
pseudonymous usernames, which, arguably, is the app’s main draw.)
Facebook needn’t
panic, though. Even if its namesake platform is now totally passé, the
kids still love Instagram — so Zuckerberg wins, either way.
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