Facebook Experiences Slight Decline in Popularity Among U.S. Teens

Are teenagers beginning to sour on Facebook? Whether it’s privacy concerns or the fact that your grandparents all have profiles, the social media platform slowly be losing its cool factor among the key teenager demographic. CBS Sacramento explains:

“In the United States, the percentage of teens ages 13 to 17 who use Facebook fell to 88 percent this year according to a report based on a survey conducted by research firm Frank N. Magid Associates.

In 2012, among that age group the drop was 95 percent and in 2013 it was 94 percent.

The study also found a decline among all the other age groups and in total, Facebook’s popularity dropped to 90 percent this year from 93 percent the past two years.”

So there’s a few takeaways here. First, Facebook isn’t going anywhere soon. It’s still wildly popular, even if six-ish percent of teens have turned away in the past year. I don’t think you could find 88% of teens who would be pro-candy let alone in support of a billion-dollar corporation. Still, if you’re Zuckerberg and company you have to wonder whether this could be the beginning of a snowball’s descent, especially when considering point number two:

“Among those polled in Frank N. Magid’s survey, 16 percent said that Facebook was trendy, 18 percent said that it was fun and 16 percent said it was informative. However, only 9 percent said it was safe and 9 percent said it was trustworthy.”

If less than one in ten young users trust Facebook, there’s not much brewing there in the way of brand loyalty. Prognosticators have long wondered when Facebook would experience its Myspace moment and get replaced by some new platform. Of course, Myspace never managed to attract 1/7 of the world’s population. Facebook may be too big and popular to fail at this point, or at least any time soon (though that hasn’t stopped yours truly from deactivating his account).

Yet with some experts predicting that Facebook’s inevitable fall will begin in 2015, it’ll be fascinating to watch these and similar numbers in the coming quarters.