Given that Facebook has lost a lot of ground among young people, with teenagers preferring Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, it seems odd to see the app’s future focus in this area.
“As we think about the next 20 years, we’re focused on two big things: building the next generation of social media for young people and leveraging new product capabilities enabled by AI.“
Is Facebook a place for young people to congregate? Really?
The statement was taken from a post published by Facebook over the weekend outlining its key future focuses as it aims to reconnect with young people.
Or simply strengthen it.
According to Facebook:
“Facebook is still open to everyone, but we’ve made big changes with young people in mind to build for the next generation of social media users. In the U.S. and Canada, youth usage of our app has grown steadily for five quarters, and the number of young daily active users in the U.S. and Canada has reached more than 40 million, the highest number in three years.“
This is interesting because, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research last year, Facebook has significantly lost its position as the preferred social app among younger users.
According to Pew:
“While Facebook was once the dominant social media platform among young Americans, the percentage of teens using the site has fallen from 71% in 2014-2015 to 33% today.”
So while Facebook may have regained popularity recently, as you can see, it is still far behind other apps and given its current reputation and conventional position, it is unclear how it will regain its position.
But Facebook says it is regaining interest from young people.
how?
- Marketplace – According to Facebook, young people We sell furniture on our marketplace to help you make big lifestyle changes (like leaving home)
- Reels – Facebook says Reels is gaining traction as a medium for exploring interests.
- Facebook Groups – FB Groups have long been a great way to connect, and Facebook says that younger users are now using them to connect with their local communities.
And what you probably didn’t expect was,
“Facebook Dating continues to see steady and strong growth in daily active users, growing 20% year-over-year among young adults in the U.S. and Canada.”
First launched in 2019 and not much talked about since then, Facebook Dating still facilitates dating matches and is seeing a surge in interest in the United States.
That means there are still ways for Facebook to attract younger users, even if its main news feed isn’t as appealing as it once was. But these are mostly practical use cases; what’s more interesting here is how much time these young people are spending on the app.
Are they just checking off these elements and then drifting off to TikTok and scrolling through clips? That would be a more contextually relevant overview than these rough notes.
For comparison, Facebook claims that 40 million young people use its app every day in the US and Canada combined. Snapchat has 100 million active users in the region, many of them young people, while TikTok claims 170 million active users in the US.
So it’s going to be an uphill battle for Facebook to get more young people to spend more time on the app, but even Facebook’s parent company, Meta, knows it needs young people’s attention to drive adoption of the Metaverse experience.
In fact, the main focus of the Metaverse is driven by the habits of younger users, with kids already spending more of their time socializing in gaming worlds like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. In essence, these are the templates for the Metaverse, where we’re already seeing kids interacting through avatars and digital characters, shifting the paradigm of how we connect. It’s this trend that Meta is using as an indicator of future interest in VR experiences, and to take it to the next level, they’ll need to tailor their development to younger users.
So the company’s announced focus on younger users makes sense. But can Facebook actually get more young users interested in Facebook again?
Facebook says it is focusing on three key elements to attract users:
- Improve Reels and Feed rankings for increased relevance
- Improved video viewing experience and the ability to share clips privately
- Improving monetization opportunities for creators
It’s unclear whether any of these will be a surefire success, but essentially Facebook is looking to build tools that go beyond the social graph it’s long relied on for its stickiness and give young people more options for connecting with people with a wider range of interests.
Admittedly, this seems like a strange statement — why announce this when you have nothing to actually announce — but for some reason, Facebook wants young people to know again that hanging out on Facebook is fun.
Because the way to be cool is to tell people you’re cool.
Either way, Facebook wants to focus on young people, so if you’re wondering why they’re adding this new feature or that new feature, it might be helpful to think about it in this context.
