A new report by financial firm Piper Jaffray revealed that almost 26 percent of teen social networking users have shifted to Twitter as their most important site especially on “buying activities.”
The Minneapolis-based firm released its 26th semi-annual report October 10 titled “Taking Stocks with Teens” involves 8,650 teens. These teens were asked to complete a survey to identify and categorized their spending and buying activities involving various social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others. They also associated the time spent of the teens staying online and see how much of it was spared to shop for items.
Their findings reveled that most of the teens have moderated their buying activities online especially on fashion-related items. The decline was caused by the absence of reliable options for the teen buyers. Most of the teens were spending long time online but that didn’t translate to more purchases as the urge to shop have also became less frequent. This is despite of two-thirds of the participants believing that the economy is stable and improving.
Most teens cited “friends” as the strongest influence on their buying activities but Internet is still within the picture. Over half of the population admitted that social networking sites affect their buying decisions. “Twitter being the most important, eclipsing Facebook, followed closely by Instagram,” according to the press release.
Facebook popularity is still on a downward trend among teens. Only 23 percent of them now consider the site important, lower than 33 percent six months ago, and 42 percent in 2012.
This is definitely good news for Twitter which recently filed its IPO and is in need of expanding its user growth to attract investors.
There may be various reports claiming that teens are leaving Facebook but to set the record straight, the Piper Jaffray report focused only on the teen buying activities on social networking sites.
