Young adults have left Facebook in droves in recent years; the mass exodus is reminiscent of something that led to the demise of MySpace. But Facebook’s latest stock prices are getting stronger and with over a billion total users, a few million uses can’t be hurting the budget too much. That still leaves the question of where these young people in their twenties are headed.
Simple is better
MySpace learned the hard way that if there is a shorter way to do something, people will take it. The youngsters got tired of learning HTML and going through extensive profile renewals every month just to manage their social media accounts. Although it could hardly be argued that Facebook is “too complex,” there are now faster and more convenient ways to share information.
Two of those examples are Instagram and Twitter; Both have gained serious competitive traction against sites like Facebook, but they do essentially very similar things. Instagram is a photo sharing application that allows users to do two things: share and like photos. Apps like Instagram have taken the visual aspect of what made Facebook and MySpace so popular with friends and put it in a box on its own; The Facebook crowd of 20 years so far has responded kindly to this simplification.
Twitter, on the other hand, has taken the other route and turned its attention to work on delivering the Facebook feed on the go. The only difference between Facebook and Twitter is that Twitter is a faster, less formal, and direct route to connecting with celebrities, news sources, and individual idols.
Is this the end of Facebook?
This is probably not the end of Facebook as you know it, at least not yet. Facebook has made modest strides to incorporate some of Twitter’s original features, such as hash tags, and make it easier for users to use its services.
It’s hard to say whether apps like Instagram and Twitter could have been so popular without the invention of the smartphone. Before the smartphone, if you wanted to switch between different services, you had to access a computer and navigate your web browser to a completely different site. This is part of the reason that Facebook became popular as an all-in-one social hub. Now, there is an app for everything and all someone has to do is go back to the home screen and click on another service in seconds.
For now, twentysomethings are doing what twentysomethings do. They are trying different services and experimenting with what they like and what they don’t like. Always looking for the latest and greatest, while remaining engaged enough to take advantage of their old service. They are still on Facebook for now, but unless Facebook undergoes some changes to attract this wave of simplification, Instagram and Twitter They could be the next big thing.