Facebook’s last monthly report has found that some of its youngest users are starting to engage more heavily with other social sites. The company is finding heavy competition for Gen Now users from sites such as SnapChat, Vine, and its own photo-sharing site Instagram.

One recent sobering moment for Facebook was when it lost Blake Ross, director of product, who announced she was leaving the company last year with this odd (if perhaps tongue-in-cheek) statement: “I’m leaving because a Forbes writer asked his son’s best friend Todd if Facebook was still cool and the friend said no, and plus none of HIS friends think so either even Leila who used to love it, and this journalism made me reconsider the long-term viability of the company.”

More worrisome for Facebook might be how the exodus of youth could be fueled less by a lack of “cool” and rather indifference towards what the site offers. Web-expert Laura Portwood-Stacer has theorized that Facebook losing its luster goes beyond teens on the hunt for constant newness.

“I think it has less to do with kids consciously looking for ‘the next big thing’ than Facebook just no longer being a space that serves them,” she said.

According to its own report, Facebook’s main competition is dispersed among more niche social nets and micro-blogging sites, especially those that are more savvy on mobile. Teens are turning to sites such as Tumblr, which has more than 150 million users, and apps like Snapchat and Instagram that give them specific social networking and communication tools.

The Verge published a telling comment from 15-year-old Collin Wisniewski, who shared this view: “Tumblr is mainly my obsession as of now. It just seems more intimate and it’s not really a place of bragging, but more of a place of sharing.”

Facebook releasing an internal report on how users might be less engaged with it could be seen as a preemptive strike, showing that the company is aware of other studies such as Pew Research finding that people are using it less. Yet its own report might be the scariest yet, where it’s not just a cross-section of users finding other ways to spend their time online but a generational shift towards other social sites.

What do you think is driving users to rely less and less on Facebook Share your comments below! 

Source Online Mail