Is Facebook no longer cool enough for kids?

It looks that way, at least according to the results of a study recently released by Pew Research Center. This particular study was conducted in order to shed some light on topics that span Internet, social media, and mobile device usage among today’s teenagers based in the United States. And the results indicate that teens nowadays appear to be preferring new websites compared to before.

It should be noted that back in 2015, Pew Research Center had conducted a similar study, and the results of that earlier endeavor show that 71 percent of teenagers (specifically, users who are between 13 to 17 years old) use Facebook, while about half of them prefer Instagram and 41 percent go for Snapchat.

Fast forwarding to three years later, American teenagers’ preferences seem to have shifted. In 2018, only 51 percent of teens are claiming they use Facebook. While it is true that Instagram and Snapchat have remained popular, Google’s YouTube has shot to the top three, supplanting what many consider as the most widely used social media platform in the face of the planet.

Indeed, Pew Research Center’s study shows that about 85 percent of of teenagers in the US stated that they use YouTube (interestingly, it was not even covered in the previous 2015 survey). 72 percent of of the teens said they use Instagram, while 69 percent of them claim they use Snapchat.

When it comes to the frequency of use, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat have once again dominated other social media brands. 35 of the respondents claimed that they use Snapchat most often. At a close second is YouTube, with 32 percent of teens saying they utilize that site most frequently, while 15 percent of the survey participants say they use Instagram the most. Just 10 percent of American teens said they use Facebook most often, while Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr got 3 percent, 1 percent, and less than 1 percent, respectively. 

As pointed out by Monica Anderson, the social media landscape among youngsters has indeed gone through some significant changes in just three years. In 2015, Facebook was the most dominant social media platform among teens, partly because other brands have not quite stepped up yet, or at least stepped up enough to start competing for attention against Facebook. In 2018, however, options when it comes to social media are more diverse than ever, and quite simply, it is now perfectly okay for people to not use Facebook all the time.

For more about Pew Research Center’s findings, head to its official website right now.