Facebook’s shrinking popularity with teens has been well documented these past couple of years, as well as overblown. Despite dubious claims that other services such as Instagram and Twitter would soon replace Facebook for teens, Facebook is still the most popular social network for teenagers by a significant margin, and the company’s concerns regarding decreased popularity have long since diminished.
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. 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.
