A survey from Pew looked into how teens use technology and which apps they use more. The results of the survey have shown that most of them have ditched Facebook and moved to more visual platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. More than half of the teens said they are online constantly and the survey shows that a lot has changed since 2015 when Pew last conducted the survey.
It appears that the rise in power of the smartphone has affected this change with 95% of the users surveyed advising they use one however a smaller number; those from lower-income families, use desktops and laptops. While most of the applications are trying to move to a mobile-first approach which has the appeal of high visual and browsable content, among those apps YouTube takes first place because 85% of the teens reported that they have been using it, with Instagram in the second place with 72% of the users, followed by Snapchat at 69%.
YouTube has surpassed Facebook in popularity and most of the teens are choosing YouTube rather than using Facebook for video consumption. Facebook used to control 71% of the market share back in 2015 but this it has decreased to 51% in this year. Only 36% of the higher income households use it and 70% of the teens in lower-income households use Facebook for social interaction. It must also be noted that there is no requirement for the most recent hardware to run these visual apps on mobiles which could be part of the appeal. Twice as many teens reported being “online constantly,” but really, it’s hard to say when any of us is truly “offline.” Teens (apparently) aren’t actually looking at their phones all day, much as it look to be the case, but they and the rest of us are usually not more than a second or two away from checking messages or looking something up.
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