Have teens ever been an important demographic for Facebook though? It started only for college students - it wasn't until three or four years later they opened it up to everyone. [And more broadly - do we use popularity among teens to measure success for anything that isn't specifically targeted primarily at teens (e.g. a company like Abercrombie & Fitch)?]

Teenagers in high school usually see their friends every day (more so than college - where you're less likely to have all or many of the same classes as your friends), there probably isn't as much desire to use a social network to keep up with what your friends/acquaintances are doing since you're experiencing it with them. After college you're more likely going weeks or months between seeing even your closest friends or family so Facebook is probably a bit more useful/exciting when your older.

But teenagers today are college students of tomorrow, and if you believe OP, the college students of tommorow may associate Facebook with years of negative impressions that they acquired throughout high school.

That's a huge barrier for Facebook to overcome, especially when a 'cooler' competitor can expand its feature set to meet the students' long-distance relationship needs without any of the stigma that they associate with Facebook.

Alternatively, rather than imprinting into a particular social network (Facebook bad, Twitter obscure, Instagram relevant) it could be that these teens will simply migrate to a different toolset when their needs change rather than expecting a tool to be used to photoblog their party lifestyle of college years to also work as a tool to keep up with post-college life. Facebook changed over time to basically follow a particular demographic (those whose age mirrored the founder) but most of the others are built for specific purposes and have a lot more inertia behind them. Maybe being first is what let Facebook change and re-define itself, but so far none of the others seem to have changed much from the day they were launched in terms of how people actually use them (and FB itself has had numerous failures in attempts to spin off mini-pivots as individual apps.)

Yes I thought the same thing when I read his article. My teenagers are 14 - 15. I am on Instagram. The biggest difference I see is they made the transition to SnapChat discussed in this article 12 months ago. It sounds like the author sees that happening now but with the younger ones they seem to have made the move over nearly a year ago. It's funny as I follow a few of them on Instagram and it just dried up to now only doing 1 or 2 pictures per week and they're closer to the "staged" sanitized FB ones he discusses.

Uh.. Could it be that people under 13 are not allowed on Facebook?

People under 18 also aren't allowed to watch porn, and people under 21 definitely can't drink.

Fair but I was suggesting that Facebook is really only useful if you have friends but when you or your friends can't signup or their parents won't allow them to signup (in my case), there's not much reason to use Facebook.

It is kind of like not needing LinkedIn until you're in college.

There's a pretty big difference between grabbing content off some site and establishing a social media presence, surely?

No? In one case, you click a button and/or check a box to confirm you are of a certain age to see porn, in the other you enter a wrong number into a specific field during account creation.

In then end, people desire something (access to content and/or interaction), and all that prevents them from having it is being completely truthful in one spot about a question that really doesn't seem that important.

It's not very hard to lie about your age - they don't ask for any proof or verification.

My middle school aged kids have no interest in Facebook at all. Instagram definitely, and texting constantly. I'm sure Snapchat will come soon too.

From the instagram terms (http://instagram.com/about/legal/terms/) you must be at least 13 to use instagram.

I don't think that's really stopped many people. It's not that difficult to lie about your age.

>> "It's definitely the most popular network amongst teens in my (UK) school."

I'm not sure I'd put to much weight on that. From my personal use and what I've seen people seem to spend longer periods of time on Facebook. Whereas Snapchat requires seconds at a time. When you're asking who used something before school you have to remember these kids likely got out of bed, didn't have time to shower and ran to the bus :) I'd love it if you had also asked about what they did after school the previous day. Of course my evidence isn't very robust either but I don't think you can draw your conclusion from that survey.