I hear this all the time, and though it may be true that "young people aren't into Facebook anymore," I think it misses the point.

When Facebook became available to high school students in 2005, teens flocked to it because it was a novelty, it was one of the few games in town, and it was, for many, a superior alternative to MySpace, which, for most, had become a garish nightmare of animated GIFs and auto-playing music widgets.

Today, there are so many options available that teens have little reason to use Facebook. They aren't as concerned with maintaining old friendships as adults or twenty-somethings because, well, they don't have many old friendships. They see, on a daily basis, almost everyone they know and have ever known, and for those they don't see, Snapchat serves just fine. For now.

As people get older, staying in touch and recording memories feels increasingly important. Facebook, a sort of nostalgia machine, is much better at capturing that kind of coherent narrative than, say, Instagram, and so people naturally migrate there as they leave college and lose touch.

I'd love to see a study that tracks social network usage from age 12 to age 25. My bet, which is obviously informed by a the kind of anecdotes you're gesturing to above, is that you'd see higher usage of "ephemeral"-type social networks in the early years (because young kids can't see past their noses and have relatively few memories) that tracks inversely with usage of networks whose content has longer-term value as time passes.

I have a 14 year old and their habits are interesting. They don't use FB. They hate how FB messes with a timeline. They were big Instagram users but dumped it pretty hard and are all in on SnapChat. Instagram is only for very deliberate "statement" photos (dressed up for school dance etc) They don't need multitask SN's like FB. They use single task apps and switch all the time between them without blinking. And they have no loyalty. They'd drop SnapChat in a second I suspect if the 3 coolest kids started using something else.

> On the other hand, young people (below 18) aren't that much into facebook anymore.

I agree, but think this misses the point. I'm not "that much into" voice telephone calls, but I still rely on them and wouldn't purchase a cell phone that couldn't make them. I'm also not willing to switch to a different method of making voice calls, even if it has substantial improvements, if I have to get all my friends and family to also switch to be able to use the service.

>> "On the other hand, young people (below 18) aren't that much into facebook anymore."

I'm not sure how true that is although I hear it all the time. I think young people are using more social networks (Snapchat, WhatsApp) but that doesn't mean they've stopped using Facebook. My younger brother and his friends spend most of their time on their phone on Facebook.