With over 1 billion users, Facebook is the size of a well developed country. Yet, is Facebook really going to be around forever? Someone said to me in conversation yesterday that Facebook will be the death of our society, with its ego driven content from dramatic individuals mixed with direct marketing tactics from companies. There is very little balance to the kind of content you will see on Facebook, and there is too much clutter to get to the meat of what you actually will want to see. There are countless articles and applications out there, meant to help clean up the clutter on Facebook, it may not be enough to keep the social media giant popular forever.
You see, Teens aren’t using Facebook.
There are many articles that were published in the past few months discussing the phenomenon. Apparently, sites like Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr are more focused, less cluttered and less drama driven.
And the baby boomers and Generation X hasn’t caught up with them yet. Which means, teens don’t worry about their parents following them and commenting on everything they do.
CNN recently wrote this article about it. And apparently teens are using Instagram, Snapchat, Messenger Systems, Pheed, AskFM and Twitter instead. So if the youngest generation is quitting Facebook, then I suppose Facebook’s mortality clock has begun ticking.
Related articles
- Without Facebook (botjerp4.wordpress.com)
- Teens To Facebook: “Okay, Bye!” (readwrite.com)
- Here’s the app teens use more than Facebook – and of course, it’s not Twitter (venturebeat.com)
Emergent IMC 
It is true that teens are not using Facebook as much as other age groups, but Facebook will not go down without a fight. The teens that I know still use Facebook, heavily. Before they were old enough they lied about how old they were to create an account. Marketers do not know much about the newest generation, maybe by the time these teens have jobs their outlook may change and Facebook will be “cool” again.
Do you think any of these platforms will remain stable for years to come? I find it interesting to consider the long-term effects of relying on social media. For personal use, what happens to the photos uploaded to Facebook after a user stops logging in? That user’s children and grandchildren may lack access to memories that today’s grandparents store in photo albums.
For brands, the effects seem a little blurrier. Do they merely drop all of the effort they committed to certain platforms simply to follow the consumer crowd, or do they maintain interest in all sites?