This past weekend, I finally got around to watching a movie that had been on my queue since 2010: David Fincher’s The Social Network. The film adaptation of the story of Facebook’s founding surprised me in a few ways, like how I didn’t know that Sean Parker was also the co-founder of Napster (the godfather of P2P filesharing).
But what stood out the most for me was that, in the beginning, Facebook was the place to be. This is in contrast to what Facebook is now, as summed up in a friend’s status update (which happened to pop up in my News Feed while I was watching the movie):
Let’s rewind a bit. When Facebook launched in 2004, it was available exclusively to Harvard students. As it gained users, it expanded to include other Ivy League campuses, and eventually all universities.
In those days, Facebook was the digital incarnation of campus social life: young people used the site to make connections, know what their friends were doing, and most importantly, know who was doing who. This exclusivity lent a hip, cool aura to the site, and to be in Facebook meant being in the “in” crowd.
Innovative features like social games, the News Feed, and the Like button attracted an increasing number of new users, and kept them coming back for more. The rise of the smartphone, allowing us to access Facebook from virtually anywhere, fueled our growing addiction.
Fast forward to the present day, where Facebook is now the world’s de facto social network: two-thirds of the world’s internet users, or over 2 billion people, are on the platform. The online course I’m taking, Facebook Blueprint, states that as of 2017:
- Nearly 1.9 billion people log into Facebook every month
- More than 1 billion people use Facebook every day
Not bad for a website started by a 20-year old undergrad from his dorm room. But why are today’s teens and young adults avoiding it?
Their parents are here
This is probably the most obvious answer. When Facebook became available to everyone else in 2006, people started flocking to the site in droves, and by 2012, Facebook had over a billion users. Now that practically everyone on the internet is on Facebook, it follows that our parents, titos and titas, and maybe even our grandparents are also in it.
For many young people, how they are seen by their peers is key to their identities. Facebook is where their parents and relatives hang out online, and for them to be seen with their parents is uncool; therefore, Facebook is uncool. Having a parent or tita post on our walls or leave comments on our posts is akin to them crashing a party; it can get a little awkward for us, but for teenagers, it is downright mortifying.
Perhaps more importantly, young people resent having their every activity monitored by their parents. No one, especially teenagers, would want their parents and older relatives keeping tabs on everything they do online, especially if it involves partying, drinking, or other goofy shenanigans. Social messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp have allowed them to keep their group conversations private, away from prying eyes.
If it’s on Facebook, it’s there forever
Back in the early days, when the audience was much smaller, we used to be carefree about the status updates and pictures we posted on Facebook. Now, with over a decade’s worth of posts to draw from and the help of the Timeline feature, virtually anyone will be able see our entire post history if we did not set our posts to Private or Friends Only. As some people may have learned to their sorrow, nothing we post on Facebook is ever truly gone, and what we posted long ago may come back to bite us in the ass.
On the professional side, some hiring managers are now combing through people’s social media profiles as part of their hiring assessments. In addition, people are expected as employees to behave on social media in a manner that will not adversely impact their companies’ corporate image. These further blurs the line between people’s professional and personal selves.
The generations that followed us, having grown up in the era of social media, are well aware of Facebook’s reach and permanence. Those young people who care about their privacy curate what they post on Facebook, wary of who might see them, and have learned to carefully manage their public image. To share snapshots of their real selves with their peers, they turn to platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, which offer a more visually engaging experience, allow them to restrict their audience, and are assured that those snapshots remain fleeting.
Facebook itself has changed
Good times we had, in the good old days
Or more accurately, the content of our News Feeds has changed. Because of the two reasons I mentioned above, gone are the days of sharing crazy party pictures, drunk posts, and everything else that made our school life and early adulthood exciting. What we see now are highly sanitized versions of our friends’ lives, liberally sprinkled with ads, political posts, and fake news, and it is turning a lot of young people off.
I could write an entire post on this particular topic, especially in light of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement about overhauling the News Feed, but I’ll save it for another day.
What does this mean in the long term?
Young people may be avoiding Facebook, but it doesn’t mean they are abandoning it entirely. In fact, a recent campaign that we ran on Facebook showed that impressions among the 18-24 demographic remain high in markets like the Philippines and Thailand. However, for most parts of the world, user growth and activity in this key demographic is slowing down. Taken as a whole, teenagers and young people are engaging less and less with Facebook, opting instead to use alternatives like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger.
Marketers who seek to engage young people should go where they are: the same campaign we ran showed that Instagram engagement was twice as high in that same demographic, compared to Facebook. However, marketers should also bear in mind that the fragmentation of channels, and the reduced audience size for these alternative platforms, would entail higher media costs.
Marketers would also be well advised to find more visually creative ways to get young people’s attention. The split tests that we ran for our Facebook and Instagram campaigns showed that visual ads are highly favored over text-heavy ads, with video ads having greater engagement than image ads.
In the long run, this demographic shift may spell trouble for Facebook’s revenue. The company relies heavily on data generated by its users (through likes, comments, shares, and even clicks) to serve highly targeted ads, and if young people continue to eschew Facebook in favor of other platforms, its value to advertisers may erode. While its ownership of Instagram may be some consolation, Facebook needs to find new, innovative ways to get this highly valuable demographic to reconnect with its platform – preferably one that does not involve Instagram cloning Snapchat.