Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from MarketingCharts, a Watershed Publishing publication providing up-to-the-minute data and research to marketers.
Teens continue to gravitate toward Instagram and away from Facebook, finds Piper Jaffray in its latest semi-annual survey of American teens. Roughly three-quarters of respondents reported using the visual platform, up from 69 percent in the previous survey. By comparison, just 45 percent said they use Facebook, a significant drop from 72 percent. (Perhaps all those almost-year-old reports of teens fleeing Facebook are finally coming true?)
In any case, Facebook's decline was enough to move the platform behind Twitter in the popularity stakes. The micro-blogging site is now the second-most used among teens, but doesn't seem to be making inroads: the 59 percent adoption rate in this latest survey marks a slight decline from 63 percent in the preceding report.
Meanwhile, Pinterest and Tumblr have stayed relatively flat, used by slightly more than one in five teens, while Google+ tumbled from 29 percent to 12 percent.
Instagram's ascendance to the top of the social heap has been quite rapid: in Piper Jaffray's Spring 2014 survey, 30 percent of teens called it their "most important" social network, overtaking Twitter (the Fall 2013 favorite) and placing more distance between itself and Facebook (the Spring 2013 favorite).
The latest study notes that 38 percent of teens believe Instagram is a favorable marketing channel through which to reach them, compared with 34 percent saying the same about Twitter and 21 percent about Facebook.
Finally, the Piper Jaffray study reports that four percent of teens use Snapchat, a surprisingly low figure given Snapchat's well-documented skew towards youth. That four percent did represent an uptick from one percent in the survey fielded six months earlier.