Remember when Facebook was a place for young people? Mark Zuckerberg remembers, and he wants to make "young adults their north star" to recapture the users who have left. But they aren't likely to come back.
As Statista so clearly illustrates, the share of teenagers who say they use Facebook has cratered over the last 10 years. Back in 2012, 94% of millennial teens said they had used the platform. Now, in 2021, that number has fallen to just 27% of Gen Z teenagers.
So what happened? Aside from the multiple data breaches, fake news, privacy controversies, mental health issues, and a seeming non-interest on Facebook's part in fixing its problems, an increase in competition has resulted in many young people giving the platform a pass.
In a recent poll of 10,000 young Americans conducted by financial company Piper Sandler, 35% of respondents said Snapchat was their favorite social app; another 30% prefer TikTok, and 22% identified Instagram as their favorite. Meanwhile, only 2% of respondents indicated that Facebook and Twitter were their favorites.
Another study, conducted by Statista, also found that Instagram is more popular than Facebook among those 18 to 24 years old. While Facebook wins out in all other age brackets, only 56% of young adults prefer Facebook, while 71% prefer Instagram.
Facebook can certainly point to its ever-growing user base, but you can no longer count young people among that group. Zuckerberg wants to get back to basics, but after years spent abandoning the social media company's most important age group, it's worth asking what Facebook has to offer teens at this point.