I hear this all the time, and though it may be true that "young people aren't into Facebook anymore," I think it misses the point.
When Facebook became available to high school students in 2005, teens flocked to it because it was a novelty, it was one of the few games in town, and it was, for many, a superior alternative to MySpace, which, for most, had become a garish nightmare of animated GIFs and auto-playing music widgets.
Today, there are so many options available that teens have little reason to use Facebook. They aren't as concerned with maintaining old friendships as adults or twenty-somethings because, well, they don't have many old friendships. They see, on a daily basis, almost everyone they know and have ever known, and for those they don't see, Snapchat serves just fine. For now.
As people get older, staying in touch and recording memories feels increasingly important. Facebook, a sort of nostalgia machine, is much better at capturing that kind of coherent narrative than, say, Instagram, and so people naturally migrate there as they leave college and lose touch.
I'd love to see a study that tracks social network usage from age 12 to age 25. My bet, which is obviously informed by a the kind of anecdotes you're gesturing to above, is that you'd see higher usage of "ephemeral"-type social networks in the early years (because young kids can't see past their noses and have relatively few memories) that tracks inversely with usage of networks whose content has longer-term value as time passes.
When Facebook became available to high school students in 2005, teens flocked to it because it was a novelty, it was one of the few games in town, and it was, for many, a superior alternative to MySpace, which, for most, had become a garish nightmare of animated GIFs and auto-playing music widgets.
Today, there are so many options available that teens have little reason to use Facebook. They aren't as concerned with maintaining old friendships as adults or twenty-somethings because, well, they don't have many old friendships. They see, on a daily basis, almost everyone they know and have ever known, and for those they don't see, Snapchat serves just fine. For now.
As people get older, staying in touch and recording memories feels increasingly important. Facebook, a sort of nostalgia machine, is much better at capturing that kind of coherent narrative than, say, Instagram, and so people naturally migrate there as they leave college and lose touch.
I'd love to see a study that tracks social network usage from age 12 to age 25. My bet, which is obviously informed by a the kind of anecdotes you're gesturing to above, is that you'd see higher usage of "ephemeral"-type social networks in the early years (because young kids can't see past their noses and have relatively few memories) that tracks inversely with usage of networks whose content has longer-term value as time passes.