Twitter More Popular Than Facebook Among Teens For The First Time

Is this a real threat for Mark Zuckerberg’s site?

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, probably the journalist who has been following Apple for the longest time, reported this nugget on his Twitter account: A Piper Jaffray report on teen consumer trends shows that teens favor Twitter over Facebook (see table below).

To my knowledge, this is the first tangible evidence of an evolution that has often been discussed but never proven. Is this a real threat for Mark Zuckerberg’s site?

Piper Jaffray’s data shows a decline of Facebook among teens (-10 percentage points in six months). But Twitter isn’t growing among teens and is only prevailing over Facebook since it is declining less rapidly.

Rather, the real threat to Facebook is the strong growth of the “other” category (+13 percentage points). It might indicate that teens are migrating to less established social networks. It is too early to say whether this move is made out of curiosity or is a real exodus.

Mark Zuckerberg, who can take comfort in Instagram’s growth (+7 percentage points), now allows young people aged 13 to 17 to make their posts public so that they be visible to the whole world… as is the case of tweets posted by Twitter users.