Kids These Days: Which Social Media Apps Are On The Rise Among Young Users

Chances are good that by 2014 your business has embraced a social media presence of some kind. Names like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are well-known and well-used in the business world. But if you want to reach a younger demographic, it’s worth doing a little research into the other social media apps out there – and there are a lot of them. Teens are an important demographic for modern-day communications tools, so it’s worth paying attention to what sites they and 20-somethings frequent.

Last fall, Facebook’s chief financial advisor confirmed that teens were becoming less active on the social media site. GlobalWebIndex came to the same conclusion, finding that the number of teenagers who say they’re active on Facebook dropped to 56 percent in the third quarter of last year, from 76 percent in the first quarter of that year.

So where are the kids hanging out?

Mirroring a general trend in social media, younger users are flocking to video- and photo-sharing apps. Younger users are also finding their way to instant-messaging apps, as well as multimedia sharing sites.

• Video-sharing app Vine, which Twitter owns, has seen huge growth in the 16-19 year old set, as has Flickr, a photo-sharing app. Active teen users for Vine grew by 639 percent and for Flickr by 254 percent, according to research. Instagram is also very popular with teens and Millennials.

• WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, saw more than 1,000 percent growth from users in the 16-19 age range, according to GlobalWebIndex’s research – although many of those users are in Asia.

• Snapchat, which allows users to share videos and photos with text that then disappear within 10 seconds, is another social app also seeing a rise in popularity among the younger set.

• Chat apps like Kik and WhatsApp allow teens to use group messaging to communicate instantly, and are also popular among younger teens.

• Pheed is a multimedia app that allows users to create and share text, photos, videos, audio tracks, voice-notes and live broadcasts.

• Twitter may not be brand-new in terms of social media chronology, but it remains popular with younger users, particularly Millennials. Google+ is also seeing growth among users in their 20’s.