There have been many articles written this week about the apparent exodus of teenagers from Facebook. According to a report released on Wednesday by iStrategyLabs, 25% fewer US teenagers use Facebook now than in 2011. In real numbers, that equates to in excess of 3 million users.
The services said to be benefiting from this are Snapchat and Instagram, which have had young adults flocking to them in droves. Facebook already owns Instagram, so no great shakes there, but having had a $3bn acquisition offer recently rejected by Snapchat, Facebook may well be feeling slightly aggrieved that a certain demographic of it users is migrating elsewhere.
However, Facebook and Snapchat are decidedly different platforms. While the instant messaging functionality is common to both, one is geared towards the gradual and continual build up of historic content, while the other is very much a single-use medium, where short messages have a half-life, after which they are gone for good.
So are teenagers less bothered about keeping permanent records of their lives, or later on in life being able to look back at what they have done online? Whatever the answer, we at SocialSafe would urge everyone to keep a backup of their social network content.
Even if you reach a point where you’ve lost interest in a certain service or format, you never know when you might want to look back and find a particular post or message from a specific person, or relive all of the moments that are captured not only in your photographs, but also the comments left by your friends.
To download your Facebook messages, photos, updates and more, use SocialSafe to create your library of you. Because leaving a social network doesn’t mean having to leave your memories.
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