Teens Tiring Of Facebook

We've seen this coming for the last year or so, but now the trend seems to be in full swing - teens are tiring of Facebook and moving their social media lives to Twitter instead. According to new Pew research data, nearly a quarter of online teens now use Twitter instead of Facebook to keep up with their friends and celebrities. This is up from 16% in 2011.

Even though 60% use the privacy settings on Facebook in order to limit their interactions to only their friends, most seem to be growing more disenchanted with the service because of "oversharing" with adults, especially parents. What's more, roughly 50% had deleted their own posts, other's comments, or untagged themselves from photos, 75% had deleted people from their network, and 58% had blocked someone from contacting them.

But parents have their own concerns as well, as 81% are concerned about how much of their children's information is being learned by advertisers. That said, teens themselves were not worried about being targeted by marketers, and just 9% expressed concern about how their data was collected.

Pew also found that teens are pretty open about themselves in general when using social media.

• 91% post a photo of themselves
• 71% post their school name
• 71% post the town or city where they live
• 53% post their email address
• 20% post their cell number

This new data is not a good long-term sign for Facebook. Although it won't mean much in the near future, the teen of today is the adult of tomorrow, and by transitioning to a different social media platform than Facebook, is now growing comfortable in their own non-Facebook world.

The Internet is strewn with social networks that were king of the hill one day and seemingly gone the next (remember MySpace, Friendster, MP3.com?). Five years from now we may be looking at Facebook in a far different light.

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