According to Piper Jaffray's semi-annual research report on the teenage market, Twitter has surpassed Facebook as the most important social website for young people.
Twitter is the "new king" in the eyes of teenagers, with 26% of respondents naming it as the "most important" social site. Only 23% of respondents said Facebook was the most important, down from a high of 42%.
However, the report points out that Twitter shouldn't become complacent. Instagram's popularity among teenagers has surged significantly. 23% of respondents said this Facebook-owned platform was their top choice, up from 12% a year ago.
These figures also align with a report by Pew. In this report, a 14-year-old girl said:
"I signed up for a Facebook account around sixth grade. For a while, I was very obsessed with the site. Then, by eighth grade, I kind of - if you go into Twitter, if you sign up for a Twitter account and an Instagram account, then you forget about Facebook, and that's what happened."
This shift indicates that Facebook's decision to acquire Instagram was correct, as it will help defend against competitors attracting younger users.
Piper Jaffray's report contrasts with Facebook's statement regarding young users but is not entirely different. The company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly discussed twice whether young people are abandoning Facebook. In September, Zuckerberg said, "We're no longer the symbol of cool." Previously, during the second-quarter earnings analyst call, Zuckerberg stated that Facebook's own research showed that young people were not deserting the site.
However, Facebook refused to share this research – despite investors' strong desire to see it.
Two different sources within Facebook revealed a discrepancy between how young people perceive Facebook and how they actually use it. Of course, Facebook may no longer be cool – after all, your mom is using it too – but it remains a very common tool, and young people have large social networks on it. Pew stated: "The average young Facebook user has 300 friends, while the average Twitter user follows only 79 accounts."