Facebook parent company Meta (FB) is doing everything in its power to get teens to love its myriad services, but a new survey shows the social networking giant is losing to viral short-video platform TikTok.
According to Piper Sandler’s semi-annual Taking Stock With Teens survey, TikTok and Snap (SNAP) are the two most popular social networks among today’s teens with Meta’s Instagram coming in third.
More concerning for Meta is the fact that TikTok’s standing with teens has improved over time, while Instagram’s has fallen. According to the survey of 7,100 U.S. teens across 44 states from Feb. 16 to March 22, 33% favor TikTok, up from 29% in the fall of 2020.
Meta is going after TikTok with all of its might. During its Q4 earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg specifically pointed to TikTok as a major competitor. And, according to The Washington Post, the company launched a smear campaign against its upstart rival.
Snap has had a rocky relationship with teens, with 34% saying they favored the messaging service in the fall of 2020 and 31% saying they liked it most in spring 2021. That number rebounded to 35% in fall 2021, before falling back to 31% in the latest survey.
Just 3% of teens said they preferred Facebook. Twitter (TWTR) might as well not even exist among teens, as only 2% said they liked Elon Musk’s platform of choice.
Teens also reported spending an average 4.2 hours on social media services each day.
Meta is struggling to improve its stance among teens, which the company sees as massively important to its advertising business. Unlike adults, teens, the thinking goes, haven’t established lifelong brand preferences. If advertisers can get their products in front of those teens, then, they have a better chance of attracting a new generation of consumers.
Social media platforms take advantage of that by trying to get as many young users on their services as possible, since doing so ensures they’ll rake in the advertising dollars they rely on. So it follows that the most popular apps among teens draw the most advertising revenue.
All hope isn’t lost for Meta, though. Instagram still draws the most engagement among teens, with 89% saying they use the service each month. Some 84% of teens say they use Snap every month, while 80% say they use TikTok.
But just 31% of teens reported using Facebook each month. More teens reported using Twitter and Pinterest (PINS) on a monthly basis.
Meta is keenly aware of the threat TikTok poses to its bottom line. Zuckerberg has called out the platform numerous times in public statements, painting it as a threat since its parent company ByteDance is based in China.
In March, The Washington Post revealed that Meta hired a Republican political consulting firm to spread fear about TikTok in an effort to get parents to keep their children off of the platform.
The group, Targeted Victory, also claimed phony trends that initially originated on Meta’s platforms came from TikTok.
Meta is also still dealing with the fallout from whistleblower Frances Haugen’s revelations that the company’s own internal surveys showed it knew Instagram negatively impacted teen girls’ body images.
The social media giant is also working on a version of Instagram for children under 13, though, following fierce pushback from lawmakers and parent groups, the company said it has put those plans on hold.
In December, members of the Senate Commerce Committee blasted Instagram chief Adam Mosseri for the platform’s attempts to hook young users.
President Joe Biden similarly lambasted social media apps’ impact on teens in his State of the Union address saying, “We must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.”
A coalition of state attorneys general is currently investigating the effects both Instagram and TikTok have on teen users.
Meta, meanwhile, is also facing an antitrust lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission, which claims the company built its social media empire by buying up smaller competitors or burying them by aping their designs when they became existential threats to the service.
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