In October 2013, now-former Facebook CFO David Ebersman said on an earnings call that the company had seen “a decrease in daily users partly among younger teens,” erasing a major stock boost Facebook had generated moments earlier.
What Teen Problem? Facebook Still Dominates Among Teenagers.
Twice as many teens use Facebook as Twitter or Google+, a new study found.
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It was pegged as the beginning of the end for Facebook — teens were out the door to the other networks while Facebook was left with those teens’ parents and (gasp!) grandparents. It wasn’t a new narrative, just one Facebook had never talked about publicly before.
Concerns over Facebook’s teen users have since diminished, at least partially, and new data released Thursday by Pew Research found that despite a dip in total teen users from a few years back, Facebook is still far and away the most popular social network among teenagers.
Roughly 71 percent of teens age 13 to 17 use the service, Pew found, and 41 percent say it’s their “most visited site.” That 71 percent is more than double the number of teens on sites like Google+ or Twitter.
The second most popular network: Instagram at 52 percent, which, you might remember, is owned by Facebook. Snapchat came in third at 41 percent of teens.
Despite Facebook’s dominance, there has been some decline in its teenage user base. Pew found that 77 percent of all teens used Facebook in 2012. But those numbers aren’t totally comparable, Amanda Lenhart, associate director of research for Pew, told Re/code in an email. Pew used to do this survey over the phone, and now it uses the Web, she explained. “We know enough about the differences between the two modes that we know we can’t match the data point for point.”
Thursday’s report included more info on teens’ Internet habits, primarily some not-so-shocking data that concludes teenagers use the Internet a lot. Nearly a quarter (24 percent) of teenagers use the Internet “almost constantly,” and more than half of them are online multiple times per day.
Nearly all teenagers (94 percent) with Internet access on their phone go online daily, versus just 68 percent who don’t have some kind of mobile access.
Pew, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group, collected the data from a “nationally representative sample of over 1,060 teens,” according to the report.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
