Facebook to Replenish its Young User Base
Facebook has disclosed that its young user base is the biggest it has been in three years.
- Over 40 million young adults from the U.S. and Canada check the app daily.
- After 20 years, Meta realizes that Facebook’s longevity lies with a younger user base.
Meta’s Facebook has recorded its biggest young adult user base in three years, indicating the giant’s efforts to reel them in are working.
According to a recent report from Meta, ‘The Future of Facebook’, the usage statistics showed that “over 40 million [American and Canadian] young adults are daily active users, and this number is the highest in three years.”
Outliving the Others
This year marks the platform’s 20th anniversary. Our story begins in 2004 in a small Harvard dorm room. Mark Zuckerberg launched “TheFacebook,” not knowing the cultural reset he would trigger. Over the years, the platform grew exponentially with anyone who was anyone was on there, even contributing to the eventual death of Myspace. However, at some point, other apps, like Snapchat and Instagram, came out with their own original concepts.
Slowly, Facebook’s user base, especially the younger demographic, started migrating toward those new and funky apps. Eventually, older generations became the only ones there. There were some younger people, but Facebook became synonymous with old people (boomers and Gen Xers), like Millennials are associated with Instagram and Gen Z with TikTok. This association made the platform quite unattractive for the rising generation looking for some type of independence from their parents. So, while Facebook still sported an impressive user base despite its two decades, the people using Facebook were no longer young and fresh. If young adults were on Facebook, they were mostly inactive.
Bring the Youth Back
The tech giant switched gears at some point and embarked on a mission to recapture the hearts—more like the likes, comments, and shares—of the younger user base. They are the future after all. In the report, Tom Alison, head of Facebook at Meta, stressed the importance of bringing youth back. He wrote, “Facebook is still for everyone, but in order to build for the next generation of social media consumers, we’ve made significant changes with young adults in mind.”
Apparently, as they transition through life, young adults have been increasingly using key features, like Marketplace, Groups, and Dating, which have seen increased usage among young adults, driving overall engagement on the platform.
Beyond that, Meta’s efforts to bring AI to its platform with AI-powered recommendations and advancements in video content have also won over many younger people. The social networking godfather is also simplifying monetization on the platform, noting the younger user base’s interest in becoming creators.
Meta’s efforts to bring back Facebook to relevancy among the young are admirable. However, this shift may not be entirely attributed to the team’s strategies. With TikTok on its way out, unless some American company purchases it, creators are looking to move their ‘businesses’ to other content-sharing platforms. And the pickings are slim, with social media apps like Instagram and Snapchat being the only other choices. So, we are seeing this uptick as people try to find where their ‘business model’ fits best.
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