The Teen Exodus from Facebook is NOT a Permanent Departure

There’s a real beauty to Facebook for adults. It allows us to keep track of things that are happening in the lives of those important to us such as friends, coworkers, family, and those who are distant from us. It’s for this reason that the hoopla about Facebook losing too many teens is being misunderstood by many, including Facebook itself.

Here’s the thing. Facebook isn’t cool. It hasn’t been cool for a couple of years. It was cool before more adults started getting on it. Now it’s a drag, at least from a teen perspective. They see their parents spending as much if not more time on it than they were and they simply don’t want to be using the same social network as them. It’s pretty natural. Few teens want to be hanging out in the same places that their grandparents hang.

More importantly, they don’t have to. The people that they want to interact with are the people that they see for several hours five days per week. For the most part, their world is isolated to their friends from school. Facebook brings no additional value to fulfill their lives the way it does with adults. As some flock to Instagram, Twitter, and other social networks, it’s natural to see this sort of exodus.

They’ll be back.

When they graduate and they really want to know more about people than what they can see in 140-characters or less or what they can discover from a 15-second video, they’ll turn to the same place they abandoned. When their friends go off to different colleges, take on different jobs, and move to different states or countries, they’ll want to keep tabs on them in ways that only Facebook can deliver.

This isn’t the end of Facebook. Kids might be the driving force that makes networks popular, but Facebook has reach a self-sustainability point. They are flocking away from it now, but they will flock right back to it in the future. They’ll have to when they can no longer see their ex-boyfriend and who he’s talking to in the lunch line. Businesses must understand this in order to make appropriate decisions about whether or not to invest in Facebook as an advertising venue. As Zach Billings mentioned in a blog post the other day, “If your target audience is an older crowd, then Facebook is still the social network of choice.”

If your future target audience is the teens that will some day be adults, then you should still stick with Facebook.

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Comment by JD Rucker on October 30, 2013 at 3:51pm: Thanks Charles, Michael, and David!

Comment by Charles Shamblee III on October 30, 2013 at 3:41pm: Well said JD!

Comment by Michael Baker on October 29, 2013 at 9:53pm: As they have continually been emerging and gained exponential popularity with many gens, starting with the millenniums, as instagram, the zoom'in twitter, YouTube, tumblr with more to come in escalation with the masses... SM is here to stay as integrated with the internet, which as a medium has seen tremendous use by the medical field and now the world wide masses at large.

Comment by David T. Gould on October 29, 2013 at 8:19pm: JD... Great post. I doubt it is just teens their losing. As FB has chased profits their user experience has dropped. Personally, FB was a great resource (originally) to interact with over 1500 friends and more likes... as they interacted I had an up to date dealer digital resource from around the country. Loved it. Once the suggested, most viewed and sponsored alterations hit FB became a huge SPAM source. I am a fan of MZ and his efforts / profits. But I see history repeating itself (myspace) and I am not so sure it is going to be easy to get users back after they have zoned out of FB. All the best, DTG

Comment by JD Rucker on October 29, 2013 at 2:47pm: It's definitely possible that another will come along, that Google+ might emerge, or that something will replace them all (Web 3.0). I gave up long ago on trying to determine the distant future in social media (with "distant" in the digital age being anything more than 6 months ahead).

Comment by Michael Baker on October 29, 2013 at 2:26pm: As FB will likely be a main stay, the millenniums will definitely return, unless another SM becomes superior in functionality and branding among this group of college grads to come... Great fundamental editorial.Thx JD