Adolescents are a market of special value for companies. On the one hand, these consumers are important because they are just beginning consumers. Brands are very aspirational for them and their relationship with them is usually very close.
They don’t have money, it is true, but they are capable of significantly pressuring their parents to buy it for them. On the other hand, today’s teens will be young adults tomorrow, when they have much more control over their own spending patterns and sources of income.
Marketers want to start engaging with them. But what avenues should be used to connect with these audiences? Using social media as a lever seems almost a given, but not all social media has the same connection to teens. Some are loved and others are hated.
The latest study on the issue has been prepared by Piper Sandler, who has started with a sample of American adolescents to determine what interests younger consumers on social media and what is not. Their conclusions allow us to separate which are their favorite social networks from those that have lost connection with them.
The statistics make it clear that Twitter and Facebook have completely lost the youngest consumers. Adolescents do not feel great emotions regarding these two social networks. Only 2% of those surveyed indicated that Facebook was their favorite social network.
The same has happened to Twitter, which shows the same favorite response percentage. Faced with this are the pull of new social networks and that of traditional popular among adolescents. 35% of teens point to Snapchat as their favorite social network, 30% say it to TikTok, and 22% stick to Instagram.
Why do some win and others don’t
What explains these phobias and phobias? Perhaps, as they remember in Insider , Twitter has become the social network of politicians, celebrities and journalists, but not so much of those young users. For Facebook, the problem comes from the place where they have won large audiences.
Facebook has been filled with baby boomers and with it has lost the appeal that it might have had in its time among the youngest. They take refuge in social networks that they mark as favorites. Instagram is, in fact, the social network that most teenagers use.
They are followed, in this order, by Snapchat and TikTok. The Snapchat pull may be difficult to use as a measure of success in Europe, but the other statistical data works perfectly as a guide to understanding what is happening and what audiences are waiting on the other side.
What this means for marketers
This data means for marketers that the strategy in social networks must be adapted to the public that they have in each of those networks. To reach the youngest consumers, there is no choice but to go through these networks and work in those spaces.
Adolescents are where they are and it will not be possible to connect with them by launching messages on the social networks that their parents use, no matter how much marketers dominate them or have internalized them in their strategy thanks to the passage of time.
For social media companies, data must be read in a different way. After all, losing teens is troublesome. They are the replacement users who need to maintain an always fresh flow of traffic. If they burn their initial users – and Facebook has already done so – they will run out of new blood if teens are turning their attention to other services.
