Falling Facebook

By: Annebeth Ahrenholz

Staying in touch with old friends, communicating with people halfway around the world, completely stalking someone’s life online without them knowing: it was all made possible when Facebook was first launched in February of 2004. Its use quickly grew to billions of people all around the world, but in recent years, Facebook has lost ground to Twitter and other new social media outlets.

Twitter came out in March of 2006 but took a couple years to take off. Once it did, it became a huge hit with millions of users tweeting every single day.  Another popular social media, Instagram, also contributed to the decrease in use of Facebook. Instagram is a social media somewhat like Twitter but users post pictures instead of tweets. It released to the public in October 2010 and rose in popularity in 2012.

“Facebook has turned into a bunch of ads, and it is so much easier to send a tweet or instagram a picture than post Facebook status,” junior Sean Fernholz said.

Part of Facebook’s fall is also due to its loss of being a teen hangout. “A lot of parents started using Facebook, and that’s when Instagram and Twitter became so popular for teenagers. The new social mediums were better and newer versions of Facebook, and that’s when they both skyrocketed,” junior Kate Moody said.

But it’s not totally over for Facebook. This year it is slowly starting to regain it’s popularity again, especially for seniors who have been posting their senior pictures.

“I haven’t used Facebook very much in the past, but I have started using it more and more to post my senior pictures. It’s a good way to share them with everyone,” senior Lauren Hudson said.

“I think that Facebook is slowly becoming popular again because people are starting to reconnect with family members and put more pictures up, such as senior pictures or just ones they have been taking throughout the year,” junior Sara Ashar said.

Although Facebook may have lost it’s popularity, it is slowly starting to reclaim its utility for many teens as they get older and can use it for important things.

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