Facebook? What? Is that still a thing?

I spoke to about 60 17-year-olds and their parents the other day about their social media use.  Myself and a colleague were looking for some answers as to why they aren’t responding to content that we put on Facebook.

I work in communications for student recruitment, and we are on seven different social platforms, one of them – the first one that we engaged with in 2009 – is Facebook.

We share informative content, entertaining content, pictures, videos, how-tos.  Yet every time we review our Facebook metrics I feel inclined to get out the social media defibrillator – hello??? are you alive in there??
[insert the sound of crickets]

There were a number of parents in the group, and one of them said, we rely on you to tell us where to get the information.  If you tell us to get the information off of Facebook then that’s where we’ll go.

OK….so we are telling you to get the information off of Facebook.

We cross-promote: we use web traffic to drive our audience to our social platforms, we use our various social platforms to drive our audience to the web. Twitter promotes the web, promotes Tumblr, promotes Instagram, promotes Facebook, promotes Snapchat; Tumblr promotes Twitter, promotes the web, promotes Facebook, promotes Snapchat; Snapchat promotes Facebook, promotes Twitter, promotes Instagram….you get the point.

We are telling you. We’ve been telling you. None of the other ‘cooler’ platforms are suffering. We’ve seen a 100-300% increase in all of our platforms’ followers and engagement in the last six months – some platforms have seen a 600% increase in half that time.

And yet, Facebook lies dorment.

Why? Is it because us old people are there?  When I was 17 I didn’t want to hang out with my parents, I didn’t want them to know what I was doing, what I was saying, who I was talking to.

Last year, Forbes released a report that identified Facebook as the only social platform to drop in users – they dropped 9%.

“…teenagers were the big demographic that often didn’t post anything in their Facebook network….”

So what is it about Facebook?  The report identifies a variety of potential reasons, one of them being the format of Facebook – it doesn’t mesh well with a user who spends the majority of their social surfing on their mobile device.

I believe it’s the parental factor: teens aren’t interested in spending time where their parents are.  They’re looking to Tumblr (95% growth) and Instagram (47% growth) and Snapchat (57% growth) because their parents are not there.

A quick very unscientific poll of the parents in the group told me that one out of the group was on Instagram, none of them are on Tumblr, nor are they on Snapchat.

Think back….remember being 16 or 17? Remember when the phone – the one and only phone in the house – was hard-wired to the kitchen wall? Did you like to sit in the kitchen with your parents listening in on your conversations with your friends? with your boyfriend or girlfriend? [gasp!] No, you stretched that spiral cord as far as it would go, up the stairs, around the corner and into your bedroom. Why? Because you didn’t want them listening in on your conversations.

Why are teens not using Facebook? Because they don’t want their parents listening in on their conversations.