It seems there are few social media networks more full of adults than Twitter, besides LinkedIn and perhaps BabyBoomerPeopleMeet.com, but it appears Facebook is fast becoming too long in the teeth for some teens - but that doesn't mean that they're deleting their profiles or becoming inactive.
A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project called "Teens, Social Media, and Privacy" measured the social media engagement of 802 teens. Their principle finding is that, while teens are sharing more personal information on social media networks, they're increasingly careful and savvy about protecting their image on Facebook. They also measured teen's attitudes toward the site, which are increasingly unfavorable.
Social media has changed in the past few years, as the drive from Internet companies to unearth genuine - and therefore useful and profitable - information from their users has led to a change in privacy expectations. Remember when you might open a MySpace account and create a fictional avatar at the same time as you pick a terribly gaudy purple and neon green color scheme? Led by Facebook, which, after all, began as a college student-only site where you needed your verified college email in order to open an account, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Google +s and LinkedIns of the web have pushed against anonymity - which was a pretty ubiquitous principle of the Internet up until now - and for web-presence authenticity, for better or for worse.
Teens growing up in this relatively new environment are providing more personal information to online social media networks than ever:
91 percent post a photo of themselves, up from 79 percent in 2006.
71 percent post their school name, up from 49 percent
71 percent post the city or town where they live, up from 61 percent
53 percent post their email address, up from 29 percent
20 percent post their cell phone number, up from 2 percent
The study also found that the large majority of teens share key information:
92 percent post their real name to the profile they use most often
84 percent post their interests, such as movies, music, or books they like
82 percent post their birth date
62 percent post their relationship status
24 percent post videos of themselves
While these aren't ditching Facebook - in fact, it's now basically socially important to have an active Facebook page - they are tiring of the site, not because of fundamental privacy concerns, but because their parents are now online. Seven of ten are friends with their parents (probably guilted into it), and focus group discussions by Pew found that they're "disliking the increasing adult presence" along with "drama" and people over-sharing. But only 9% of teens are "very" concerned about third-party access to their personal information, with another 31 percent somewhat concerned.
However, teens may generally have some ground for confidence, as a large majority of them actively manage their online presence:
59 percent have deleted or edited something that they posted in the past
53 percent have deleted comments from others on their profile or account
45 percent have removed their name from photos that have been tagged to identify them
31 percent have deleted or deactivated an entire profile or account
Still, teens are increasingly using Twitter - up from 16 percent in 2011 to 24 percent now - perhaps for the limited online presence: while your typical teen on Facebook had about 300 friends, including family members and the dreaded parents, Twitter teens had, on average, only 79 followers. Twitter is also easier to create anonymous, fake accounts with, though the study didn't ask if that was a factor in its increasing popularity with teens.
And while there's not enough information yet to tell whether or not this study is a presage of the return of the long lost Internet principle of anonymity, there's certainly a lot more information in this study providing food for thought for social media trend-watchers: For where the teens and their disposable income go, there goes the advertisers and eventually everyone else---including parents.