Facebook still shows muscle in drawing in young and old

Yes, old news. We know. Facebook demographics is believed to be caught up in a troublesome shift and Facebook had better brace itself. Fandom does not last forever. Younger users are fleeing for the likes of Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, with a more comfortable sense that their late nights out and new hobbies will not be studied daily by older relatives. At the same time, so the old news goes, Facebook is becoming more of a landing pad for older users.

So is all this correct? No. Throw the news overboard as technology writers are now busy looking at a graph, from comScore's recent report, and they say the Internet analytics company's findings tell a different story.

Re/code's Kurt Wagner, senior editor, social media, said "Turns out that while investors (and the media) panicked that Facebook would experience a mass exodus of young people, nearly every Internet-wielding millennial in America still uses Facebook on a regular basis."

The comScore report found that nearly 100 percent of people ages 18 to 34 in the US used the social network as of December 2015. "Coming in a distant second, with under 65%, is Instagram—which is owned by Facebook," said Rob Price, technology reporter for Business Insider UK.

The numbers would not hold much water if it were just a case of counting people who were signed up for Facebook but using their online minutes on other sites. Price said that was not the case. (The comScore effort researched both the percentage of 18- to 34-year-old Internet users who frequent each major social network each month and the time users spent with each service.)

"And it's not as if millennials are signed up for Facebook but not using it. Take a look at the y-axis: Facebook absolutely smashes it on the average amount of time users spend on the site each month, too. Facebook users are on the site (or app) for more than 1,000 minutes a month on average; Snapchat, in second place, is under 400."

Damon Beres, senior tech editor, The Huffington Post, was impressed. He said the comScore figures reveal that "Facebook is annihilating the competition when it comes to how much time people spend on social networks. Not only does Facebook reach a much larger audience than services such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat, it also saps more time from the people who use it."

The report in the spotlight, as its title suggests, "Cross-Platform Future In Focus," covers topics beyond just Facebook; it explores how people are consuming digital media, but, as Beres said, "Facebook numbers stand out simply because they highlight how powerful the company is no matter the age group."

Price commented that "The Menlo Park, California, tech giant remains far and away the dominant social network on the web. Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and the rest are minuscule in comparison."-

Those millennials using Facebook, Wagner said, "spend more than 2.5 times as many minutes in Facebook as they do in its closest competitor—Snapchat. (Facebook-owned Instagram is a very close third.)"

© 2016 Tech Xplore