A 15 Year Old’s View on Social Apps
I am 15 years old, I’m writing this after I read a post about a “19 year old” writing about applications from the perspective of a millennial (mobile generation).
Background Story
As a person who grew up in a digital world and is born on a mobile generation; I’m young, tech-savvy, interested in the ever growing tech industry, skills in business & marketing, very cultured and on top of trends/futures. Those qualities are very valuable asset to any team who is breaching on innovation and working on products to attract the future generation. Why? If tech companies are making mobile products in hope to attract the fast paced mobile generation, millennials would be their valuable key because we think differently and know what they want for their own demographic.
I’m talking about my thoughts, uses and observations of a 15 year old living in Australia. My opinions expressed may not be the same as someone of a different age, race, social or economic class.
Thoughts On Apps By A 15 Year Old
First, the attention span for a millennial is very short, so I’m going to keep this short. I’ll be posting another very detailed story, this story is just a quick mockup.
A more of a compulsory social network, by the age of 13 you should have a Facebook but it’s not one to share much on, it’s not the ‘cool’ thing to be on and for the even younger generation (13 year olds now) they are not even on it and resort to other social networks. It’s content feed is broken, filled with vines, clickbait, ads & more clickbait.
It’s especially discouraged users to start thinking about it’s clunky user experience where it auto-plays facebook video which for a teen is 80% of their feed becuase teenagers like pages or their friends share posts which is full of videos. I know my friends have stopped using Facebook on a 4G connection because it uses too much data and this would be the same for people around the world. If you see a decline in teen usage, I could list out at least 20 more reasons but like I said I want to keep this short.
Popular among my demographic but another one to not share to much on, more people look and follow than actually post. The UX and UI is very good, the quick and simple function of either post or look at photos is attracting to younger users. I can’t say anything bad about this app but I can see more people stop using Instagram for sharing party selfies and instead use Snapchat, so if you see a decline in Instagram’s teen usage, it’s going to Snapchat.
The fact that it was acquired by Facebook doesn't matter, most teenagers don’t know or don’t care, the ads are well done and the like/comment ratio along with reactions from the community has been surprisingly positive.
I talk more about Snapchat vs Instagram over here: https://medium.com/@IshanHaq/battle-of-sharing-snapchat-vs-instagram-d302ff1e3f50
Snapchat
VERY, very popular in my demographic and just in general with the 30 & under audience. Snapchat is different, it’s private, everybody over shares, the ad retention is very high, and even in the public part of SC (MyStory) people who would never post on FB or IG over share on MyStory.
It’s capturing users that don’t share often because it’s not dependent on likes, everybody my age cares about social status, if their post doesn't get 50+ likes they will delete it and slowly stop using that social network to post on. I could talk so much about what makes Snapchat extremely valuable but I’ll stop here.
I talk more about Snapchat vs Instagram over here: https://medium.com/@IshanHaq/battle-of-sharing-snapchat-vs-instagram-d302ff1e3f50
Tumblr
Although it’s not popular in my location, it’s massive in a ton of countries. Their demographic is mostly females and guys don’t usually go on it because in the teen demo it’s sort of known as a girls social network. Don’t get me wrong, there still a load of guys that use Tumblr but it’s mostly known as a place where girls post picture of “attractive men and quoted images”.
I can see it continuing to grow, Yahoo! made a great decision, the usage for teens is very high. It’s a built a community around the platform that keeps the users engaged with the site, and it’s less with friends, more with random strangers that make it intriguing.
This is getting mildly popular among high school teens & even more popular with college students. It’s even getting extremely popular among the middle school (10–13 year old demo) kids because of large internet influencers. They sign up on twitter to follow their favorite band, actor etc. but more importantly internet personalities e.g. Vine, YouTube and Twitch stars.
I don’t want to be mean but their ads are rubbish, I ignore all of them, they need to find some other way of monetizing the damn thing and I know a great way but i’ll wait for them to figure it out. App installs on Twitter seems promising and will bring hopefully spikes in revenue, it could work out but overall; teens don’t really use Twitter to see what their friends are doing, more to see what their idols are doing.
Yik Yak
Again, this is not popular with my location nor demo. From what I understand, this is very popular in the US among colleges. I think it could be just a fad, there’s no advertising opportunities on it nor any subscription model, I have a great idea for a way they could monetize the app. It’s dangerous as it is anon social, it can create a ton of problems for cyber bullying, meet ups for fights, scandals etc. If they focused on more than text *wink*, I know they can become the next big thing. The app would never work out in the high school audience, I can’t comment more about it. Anonymous is a fad, just like ask.fm was. (BURN)
There’s many other apps like Vine and Whisper but that can be for another post. Let me know what you think and what I should cover on next in-detail! This was a short and effortless post, I’d be glad to do more in much finer quality.
