Social network giant Facebook is slowly losing its charm and has become less appealing to youngsters with more than 11 million such users quitting the site since 2011, according to digital consultancy iStrategy Labs.
Facebook has been losing its appeal among the younger audience and a latest study translates the declining teen usage into numbers. The report collected data from Facebook's Social Advertising platform to give a clear picture of just how many young users have left the social network in the last three years. According to the iStrategy digital consultancy labs, Facebook has 4,292,080 fewer high-school aged users and 6,948,848 college-aged users now than it did in 2011.
This can pose a major problem in generating revenues for Facebook, as it makes a lot of money through ads. Advertisers have been attracted to Facebook because of its huge young user-base. Promoting products to the younger age group is more beneficial as their tastes are more malleable. Now that Facebook is losing out on their young users, it might affect the rates they can charge advertisers.
In October, Facebook had admitted that the usage of younger teens is declining on the site. Despite that Facebook is still regarded as the biggest social networking giant with over a billion users, mostly because the loss of teen users is covered up by adults. But this has not stopped the social giant from finding ways to keep its user-base intact.
Frequent modification to the NewsFeed section to include more rich content has been employed as a means to keep its users more engaged on the site. On Tuesday, the company also decided to give less prominence to text-only status updates from brand Pages as they did not have a positive impact on user-engagement. Facebook also took a page from Twitter in integrating "What's Trending" feature, so users are updated with the latest and most appealing news around them.
