Teens and Facebook Use

What people may be forgetting

I’ll put it out there: I am a Facebook shareholder. I’m not a trader by any means. If anything, I’m more interested in in the design of the annual report, than all the esoteric numbers and acronyms that are inside. But I do have a brokerage account that I use in case a compelling company catches my eye. After Facebook’s disastrous IPO last year, I took the plunge and bought some shares. My reasoning: I use Facebook daily; all my friends use Facebook regularly; and most importantly, my parents, who are in their late 60s and all their baby-boomer friends use Facebook daily. In fact, my parents, I would say, are power users of Facebook. They post incredible amounts of stuff on their newsfeeds. I, however, take quite some time to compose a status update. Though I digress: the gains that I’ve made since buying shares have been nice, and I don’t expect to sell my Facebook (FB) shares anytime soon. In trading lingo, I would be “long” on FB.

The past few news days have revolved around FB’s earnings report, which I happen to catch a transcript of. I characterize the stories as wishy-washy in a sense that the spin around the stock and the roller coaster increase and decrease of the share price have been all over the place. I was pleased to read that FB’s earnings demolished (annihilated) estimates, sending its shares up, up, up, but then a curious thing happened. The FB exec transitioned into FB usage and demographics, particularly focusing on the decrease use of FB by teens. And suddenly the stock went down, down, down. All stock gains prior to that statement from Facebook’s otherwise fantastic quarter disappeared. Everyone started to point fingers at teen users.

I agree that teens are fickle (translation: low attention spans), which most analysts have nailed spot on. Though fickleness is not the only thing that should be considered. Most teens and their friends live within proximity of each other. So the relationship between 13-17 teen and low teenage use of Facebook shouldn’t be a surprise. They are more likely to update their friends in person than online; or engage their friends through text messaging; or play multiuser games like World of Warcraft (the latter my 10 year old nephew uses almost daily with his friends).

Once these teens leave their hometowns to go off to college, Facebook becomes an essential social media platform. All their high school friends have moved to different states; they have made new college friends from other parts of the country, if not the world. Facebook becomes an easy way for these once “apathetic-to-Facebook” teens to connect.

A year or so ago, I took an informal survey in a college course that I taught among my students about their social media habits. Most if not all, raised their hands when I asked how many of them used Facebook. Less hands appeared when I asked about their Twitter use. More female hands rose when I asked about Pinterest. And a few used Reddit or other less popular social media sites. This was one class, with about twenty students in it. My point however is this: Facebook is about shortening the distance between user A and user B. If that distance is already shortened by the fact that high school friends live in the same town and all go to the same school, what really is the incentive to use Facebook, let alone Google+, or other robust social media platforms?

And so when a 13 year old op-ed writer says, “I’m 13 and none of my friends use Facebook,” I’m not surprised. Though as soon as this teen goes off to college and says goodbye to her friends, it’ll also come as no surprise to hear her do a complete 180.

I acknowledge that I am probably decades removed from the culture of teens, though I know that teen habits are predictable. They are, of course, fickle—not doubt—but they also prefer instant gratification. Facebook is a robust platform that is probably too robust for the average teen. Facebook should seek teen engagement elsewhere or devise another app or platform that takes into account the local proximity of teens and their friends.

What we probably all know too, since we were once teens ourselves, is that teens are unreliable, and to use them as the one metric to gauge the continued growth of a company that has over a 1 billion users and more than half a billion active users is total hokum.

I remember how depressed my mom was when she couldn’t log into her Facebook account. That’s when I knew Facebook was onto something. Connections become more meaningful as we grow older, and Facebook makes many of those connections happen wherever in the world those friends happen to be. For that, I continue to use Facebook, to maintain friendships that would otherwise be impossible to maintain. These kids will soon enough get to that realization.

Two last points: teens need to know how that there IS a BLOCK function on Facebook. It took me five years to unblock my parents and to finally friend them (and I’m in my mid-30s!). And parents: your teen kids would rather you not get into their business. Yes, watch your children’s Internet habits but not to the extent that you come across as an overbearing parental stalker.