SHESPEAKS Your Power to Influence

Now that you finally made it to your teen's ‘friends’ list on Facebook and feel like you have a good understanding of how they connect with friends, our teens may be moving on to some other site where parents’ presence isn’t so prevalent. A new survey reveals many teens are tiring of Facebook, turning to other sites like Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter to socialize online.

Time reports about the Pew Research Center Study that suggests teens are growing tired of the Facebook trend for a number of reasons, one being that they share the site with parents who have come to understand and use the social media site as well as them.

The study reveals that 70% of Facebook teens have one or more parents on their friend list. A 17-year-old male respondent explains why Facebook has lost its appeal for him. He says, “It sucks … because then they start asking me questions like why are you doing this, why are you doing that. If I don’t get privacy at home, at least, I think, I should get privacy on a social network.” More than half of the teens surveyed admit they have made the decision not to post something after thinking about how parents or certain friends may react.

Another reason teens expressed their growing frustration with Facebook was the high rate of stress and drama they deal with when logging on. A 14-year-old female respondent explains, “I think Facebook can be fun, but also it’s drama central. On Facebook, people imply things and say things, even just by a Like, that they wouldn’t say in real life.”

Though teens continue to log onto Facebook at a growing rate, it seems they are now visiting other sites to fulfill their social networking needs. Both Twitter and Instagram are seeing a huge increase of teen users and teens are spending less time on their Facebook accounts as they make time for visiting these other sites. Whether or not teens will grow tired enough of Facebook to move on to something else entirely (like how they migrated from MySpace to Facebook) is not yet known, but surely a possibility. Senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, Mary Madden, can’t make the prediction about Facebook but says, “Teenagers are notoriously fickle with their technology use. When you look at teenagers’ sentiments … it is for them no longer a new, exciting platform. There is definitely competition.”

Have you noticed your teen growing tired of Facebook and spending time on other social media more often?

Do you think teens will soon drop Facebook and find some other social media site to connect with friends on?