What if teens don’t like Facebook anymore?

If the social network provoked some kind of virtual tsunami in the last decade, it seems like teens don’t use or sign up on it anymore. A study published in the last few weeks by the Pew Research Center proves it. Divided by different criterias such as ethnicity, sex or income, the study shows what are the most used social networks and with which tool.

Based on American teens from 13 to 17, this study gives an idea about young occidental relation with technologies. Keep on learning about this study and discover a few tips on how to adapt content to a young audience when you represent a brand.

Increasingly out of love

A few years ago we seemed to believe this platform was unbeatable. However, Mark Zuckerberg’s baby is less and less popular with the teens of today. The Pew Research Center states that only half of young Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 years old, have an account that they visit regularly. Surprising, when 95% of young adults have access to a smartphone which wasn’t the case a few years ago. When the Pew Research Center first conducted their study in 2015, the stat stood at 73%.

Some young adults do not even have an active account on Facebook anymore. Why you may ask? The originally most popular social platform seems to not have enough visual aspects and not ‘artsy’ enough. The study also shows that children living in a higher income household do not use the platform. But you have to take some and leave some when looking at these numbers...

What does this mean for a brand?

The study generated by the Pew Research Center is the perfect tool for a brand to use in order to understand how and who to target but most importantly, by which network.

A brand with a strong visual identity will focus on developing their communications on Instagram. A brand that is more oriented to fashion will also use this platform.

Using the beauty brand, Fenty Beauty by the one and only Rihanna: the singer is already extremely popular on Instagram with a steep following of 63 million followers on her personal account. For Fenty, the account is just shy of 4 million followers, in contrast the Facebook account has only 400 000 Fans. This comes as no surprise given Instagram is the perfect platform to develop online campaigns with the aid of Influencers, sharing numerous photos and simple makeup tutorials.

Less popular, but far from dead

This obviously doesn’t mean that brands must leave Facebook and stop managing their pages. Certain companies must continue using this platform, and this is not an issue if there is an effort made to adapt their content. Unfortunately there is no magic recipe, but the trick is to find what kind of content is effective and encourages the community to comment and share posts.

Creating contests or challenges is one of the most effective ways to target a younger audience. Taking one of our clients as example: Fruité. With the majority of the audience falling into the 18-24 age group, we could say that the Facebook page for this client works extremely well. For this brand, while revisiting the published content, our team came to the conclusion that fun content performed very well with this younger audience. Memes, Photoshop challenges and contests are extremely successful on this page. Young adults share the content, tag their friends and comment; basically they love the content and engage consistently with it.

The popularity of social media within the younger community is constantly evolving and will continue to fluctuate. Maybe in 5 years another platform will take over. The important factor is brands must always be prepared to adapt to the demands of young adults. Why must brands adapt to teens? They have an opinion and aren’t afraid to share it, they lose attention fast, but they are your current and future clientele.

Feel free to share any tips you’ve found to target a younger audience and most importantly how to keep their normally short attention span!