Facebook is Losing Homelanders. NewsWire

NewsWire: 9/8/22

• The share of U.S. teens using Facebook has plummeted since 2015. As platforms like TikTok and Snapchat have soared in popularity, Facebook has tumbled to the point where less than a third of teens use it. (Pew Research Center)
  
• NH: In 2014-15, 71% of American teens (ages 13-17) told Pew that they used Facebook (META). Seven years later, this share has plunged to 32%.
• Other platforms that debuted pre-2010 also lost ground among teens over this period, including Twitter (TWTR, down -10 percentage points to 23%), and Tumblr (down -9 percentage points to 5%). But their decline in users was not as dramatic.
• Replacing Facebook as the top social media platform is TikTok, which debuted in 2018 and is now used by 67% of teens. Two other platforms also saw their popularity grow: Snapchat (SNAP, up +18 percentage points to 59%) and Instagram (META, up +10 percentage points to 62%). These three are now the only social media apps used by the majority of teens. The most popular online platform overall is YouTube, which is used by 95% of all teens.

• YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat lead the pack when it comes to the share of teens who use them regularly. Nearly a fifth of teens (19%) say they use YouTube “almost constantly.” 16% say the same for TikTok and 15% for Snapchat. For Facebook, this is a mere 2%.
• The picture for Meta gets even worse when the results are further subdivided by age. Across the board, younger teens ages 13-14 are less likely to use social media sites or apps compared to those ages 15-17. But the difference is larger for Facebook and Instagram. The difference in TikTok usage between the two groups, for example, is only 10 percentage points (71% of older teens vs. 61% of younger teens). For Facebook, it’s 16 percentage points (39% vs 23%), and for Instagram, 28 percentage points (72% vs. 45%).

• Clearly, Meta is aware of its issues attracting young users. Many of Facebook and Instagram’s updates over the past year have made them more like TikTok (see: Facebook’s new “discovery engine” and the addition of Reels), much like previous updates made them more like Snapchat. But these figures suggest that it has a long way to go.