A Forrester Research report entitled Why the Sky Isn't Falling on the World's Favorite Social Network by Nate Elliott and Gina Fleming reveals that Facebook is still the most used social network by teenagers.
A survey by the researchers that asked 4,517 respondents of ages 12 years old to 17 years old on their social network activity revealed that Facebook remains as the age group's favorite social network.
The teenagers were asked if they use social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, and how frequent they use the sites.
The results of the survey showed that almost 80 percent of online teenagers use Facebook, which is a percentage that is at least twice as many as those that use Snapchat, Vine, Pinterest, Tumblr and WhatsApp.
Instagram comes in behind Facebook, but at a distant rating of just over 50 percent. Twitter comes next and is followed by Google+ both coming in at a rating of over 40 percent.
The website that has the greatest usage among teenagers, however, is YouTube, which scored almost 90 percent.
However, in terms of hyperusage, Facebook scored the highest. Hyperusage is the number of respondents that said that they use the social network "all the time." About 28 percent of teenagers that use Facebook are hyperusers, higher than for any other social network.
The research report puts a rest to the notion the Facebook is slowly losing its hold on teenage users. This idea was spurred by Facebook's Q3 earning report, wherein CFO David Ebersman said that the company was seeing a decrease in daily users among teenagers.
The findings of the research report contradict the forecast of Ivy League researchers that Facebook will be gone by 2017. Even the claims of President Barack Obama, who said that young people "don't use Facebook anymore," is refuted.
When a recent comScore report showed that there was a three-percent drop in Facebook usage by college-aged adults, media outlets ran stories saying that college kids have started preferring other social platforms, despite the same report revealing that 89 percent of the market still used Facebook, which is a percentage higher than any other social network.
"Since Facebook's CFO admitted in 2013 that young teens were visiting the site slightly less frequently, most marketers have accepted as fact that teens are fleeing the site en masse. But that's simply not true," Elliott said.
The research report also adds that younger teenagers will most likely use Facebook more once they have their own mobile phones.
In addition, the research report also said that teenagers are using Facebook more than they used to, which means that Facebook's ability to attract and retain teenage users is far from losing its power.
