Teens prefer Tik Tok and YouTube over Instagram
Facebook is making great efforts to attract teenagers and young adults to its platforms, especially Instagram, but in fact they are spending an increasing amount of time on Tik Tok.
An American survey of 4,600 male and female teens found that Tik Tok has become the best application for this emerging age group, and let's not forget YouTube, even though it does not appear in the graph.
Teens spend more time on Tik Tok:
As you can see in this graph above, according to Forrester's Consumer Technographics US Youth Survey, 63% of teens in the US report that they use TikTok weekly now, up from 50% last year, compared to 57% for Instagram, which has declined significantly ( down from 61%).
The numbers underscore the rapid growth of the Chinese app, and its popularity among younger audiences, an element that frightened Facebook before it announced a new strategy based on Metaverse, an attempt to appeal to teens and emerging groups.
Meta's usual approach to such competitors has been to try to buy them first before they get too big, but it hasn't succeeded in acquiring TikTok as it has failed to acquire Snapchat before.
Instagram Reels feature fails to change the equation:
Facebook previously copied the Stories feature to its applications, and this succeeded in slowing down Snapchat, and with the same concept, the company launched Reels for the Instagram application to counter Tik Tok.
Further examining these trends, Forrester found that users perceive Tik Tok as more “fun” and “fun,” and an overall more positive experience than Instagram.
Although Tik Tok offers the same mechanism of content production and sharing, Tik Tok has become the title of short video clips designed primarily for mobile.
YouTube is very important on the competition map:
It's also worth noting that despite not being included in the chart above, YouTube is still the most used app among teen users in the US, with 72% of teens using YouTube weekly, according to Forrester stats.
This, in general, seems to indicate broader trends among younger audiences, with YouTube and TikTok now leading the way in their respective usage paths (although YouTube is also trying to eat up TikTok's market share through "Shorts"), while Instagram is falling behind. And Facebook is more with negative pressure on the company and is attracting older users.
Facebook crisis with teenagers and young people
This data is a major concern for Meta, especially as it intends to build metaverses and engage youth is a staple in all tech trends and get users younger, tech-savvy and more trend-setting, and if Meta continues to lose ground to competitors, this could make Difficult to increase the adoption of VR and augmented reality tools.
It is not clear how the company will change the rules of the game in the field that it still dominates, although in terms of videos it performs less than YouTube and Tik Tok.
At this time, more money from advertisers targeting young people goes to Tik Tok, Snapchat and YouTube, which are the most stable platforms currently in broadcasting ads and using targeting without causing much controversy, unlike Facebook, whose business is subject to scrutiny and it turns out that one of the secrets of its success is spying on users And competitors and the use of some methods that enhance its monopoly on the market.
Faced with this reality, marketers should focus on other platforms that compete with Facebook, especially when providing products and services targeting teenagers and young adults.