With the tough fight among the social media giants including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc, it has always been the primary motive of these companies to target the teenagers as most of the user base of the social media platforms comes from the teens.
Though Instagram and Facebook have been prevailing in the market since a long time, Snapchat seems to grab more attention of the teenagers in the US. According to a study, the photo-messaging application Snapchat has proved to be the most preferred social networking platform among US teenagers, beating the user base of Facebook and Instagram in that age-category.
According to a research done by market research company eMarketer, this year i.e in 2018, 16.4 million 12 to 17 year-olds are likely to use Snapchat as compared with 12.8 million for Instagram. Furthermore, it has also been anticipated that Snapchat will remain dominant among teenagers till the year 2022.
“Snapchat and Instagram are the top social apps for teens, and this year they’ll add nearly the same number of new teen users,” Christopher Bendtsen, Senior Forecasting Analyst, eMarketer said.
“Snapchat will continue to add users aged 12 to 17, while Facebook will continue to lose users in that cohort. In fact, we estimate Snapchat will add 1.2 million new users in that age group by 2022, while Facebook will lose 2.2 million,” the report added.
On one hand where Snapchat is gaining users, Facebook is expected to lose a lot of them. This year, 11.5 million people in the US ages 12 to 17 will be on Facebook, down from 12.1 million in 2017. The number of Facebook users in that age bracket is expected drop to 9.3 million by the year 2022.