By Emily Pollak, News Correspondent
Facebook has begun to see a potential downturn, as the company recently announced that average daily teen usership has shrunk. Although the social networking giant has not yet seen a loss in its general number of users, many news sources have started asking questions that contemplate the long-term effects of this information.
David Ebersman, the Chief Financial Officer of Facebook, told company officials in October 2013 that the social network had evidence of a decrease in daily users, especially US teens. However, despite the average daily user decreasing in this demographic there has been little to no effect on the number of monthly average users, or anything beyond that.
According to Mediabistro, a news broadcast website, Facebook still leads the social media pack with 1 billion active users while Twitter follows behind with 560 million. Instagram comes up in third, with 150 million.
Yet, in research published by Forbes, Piper Jaffray, an investment bank and asset management firm, found that in the fall of 2012, 42 percent of teenagers polled said they preferred Facebook over other social media sites. That number decreased to 33 percent six months later, and currently sits at 23 percent.
So why is the typical teen discounting the use of Facebook on a daily basis? And will this decline inevitably lead to a decrease in daily users of all ages? If Facebook does in fact begin to see a decrease in users this could then lead to the weakening of the overall valuation of the company.
Angela Scibelli, the associate marketing manager and digital/social innovation manager at Old Navy said, “[Facebook] may be a little past … As far as reaching a younger consumer we [Old Navy] look to Pinterest and Instagram for that because that’s where they are.”
News sources including Forbes, US News & World Report, TIME and The Guardian suggest that one of the many prominent reasons teens are drifting from this platform is the overwhelming presence of an older generation, including their parents and relatives.
“When the perfect Facebook was first launched, it was for college students only, and the only way you could get on [Facebook] was if you had a college email address,” Scibelli said. “When it opened up to outside college students, teenagers were the first ones to jump on it because it was the people they aspired to be, the cool twenty-somethings that were on it, so they wanted to be on it too.”
After the quick inflow of teenagers, moms and relatives were quick to follow, Scibelli said.
“Everybody knows there are a lot of moms on Facebook, the stay at home mom is an avid user,” he said. “That’s why I think the younger generation is drifting away from it, because it’s not really the ‘cool’ thing to be on anymore.”
Junior communications major Gina Quagliata agreed that family is a big deterrent from using Facebook.
“I didn’t add my parents as friends on Facebook until my middler year,” she said. “I didn’t add them before because I didn’t want to be policed about things. I wanted my independence.”
The question then becomes what new platforms are this generation moving toward and what do they provide that Facebook does not.
Harrison Solomon, a middler finance and economics major, said he thinks the social media platforms Facebook users are gravitating towards are Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
One reason why a switch may be happening is that these social media sites are newer in comparison to Facebook, which was launched in 2004, and their parents and relatives have not yet affected these sites, according to many users. Twitter was launched in 2006 while Pinterest and Instagram launched in 2010.
“I feel like I can get the same information on Instagram or Twitter faster than I can on Facebook because [on Facebook] I have to scroll through irrelevant posts or ads,” junior communications major Taylor Aigner said. “I find Facebook to be a hassle because of all the extra stuff on there.”
Middler behavioral neuroscience major Ryan Margolin agreed that this “extra stuff” is a contributing factor to the social media site’s decline.
“People use specialized social media right now,” he said. “Facebook is all in one but on a more general sense. But Instagram and Twitter have a niche that they capitalize on … if you have Twitter, Instagram and text messaging you basically have all the functionality of Facebook at more personal in depth level.”
Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook?
Although a minor decrease in the daily user has been seen, there has been no evidence that this has begun to affect the user count overall. It appears that teens are using Facebook less on a day-to-day basis but keep their accounts around to check in less frequently.
“They may see a downturn in active users, but as for people who have a login to the platform – I don’t think that will go down because people don’t want to lose the pictures and all those memories,” Scibelli said.
Despite other forms of social media gaining momentum for a number of reasons, Facebook doesn’t appear to be taking a monetary dive. On the same earnings call where Adweek reported Ebersman announcing the decrease in daily users he also announced that Facebook earned a “record 2 billion in quarterly revenue.” Facebook has been one of the highest performing stocks of the past year, earning a yearly return of over 100 percent.
“People are really eager to spread out their usage of social tools as innovations emerge to try them … But the evidence doesn’t really show that people are quitting Facebook in order to do that,” David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” told USA Today.
As middler mechanical engineering student Landon Goldfarb put it, “Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.”
