There is brighter news however in a new report from Socialbakers, in which the recent theory that ‘teenagers are leaving Facebook in their droves’ is revealed to be not quite as it seems.

More on that later. First let’s take a look at Pinterest’s win.

  • Pinterest’s Pin It button overtook the Facebook Like button and the Tweet button on product pages. 

Retailers have quickly realised the high value potential of Pinterest users. As the Adobe report revealed, Pinterest drives the highest referral revenue in the UK. In the USA Pinterest users spend more per order too, in fact more than double that of Twitter or Facebook users.

For more information, read the article how retailers can use Pinterest to drive sales.

Let’s be even-handed about this though. Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It is first and foremost a social network and recent news feed changes have only encouraged a more personal, relevant user experience, away from page broadcasting.

As more retailers have to adopt a pay-for-play approach to Facebook marketing, it is still beneficial for a retailer to maintain its free-to-run page, even if its reach has been limited.

  • 99% of retailers surveyed have a Facebook page, YouTube comes in a narrow second with 98% of retailers running a YouTube channel

The bottom table shows launch dates and adoption rates by brands. As you can see, newly launched social media platforms achieve very high adoption rates early on. Brands are obviously keen to be early adopters, with Vine having only just celebrated its first birthday, 38% of retailers have already adopted the platform.

Again though, Pinterest is closing in. Fast.

Better news comes from Socialbakers.

A couple of Princeton University students recently posited that Facebook is in fact a virulent social disease that will have lost 80% of its users by 2017. This has obviously led to many reports being spun in a negative light towards Facebook.

Socialbakers has just completed its own study however, analysing the activity of Facebook Pages covering 960m fans and has reached a contradictory conclusion.

  • The teen category of 13–24 year old saw a growth of 29.12% in terms of reach across 2013.
  • The 18–24 year-old age group is still the largest and the absolute reach increased by 39.33% across the same period.

Although teens are obviously using an increased amount of multiple platforms, they are also sticking with Facebook.

Perhaps even more encouragingly, the 35-44 age bracket is seeing incredibly strong growth. The users in this bracket are also likely to spend more and are less likely to wander off towards seemingly trendier platforms.

Let’s also not forget that one of those seemingly ‘trendier’ platforms that teens are adopting at a high level is Instagram. A platform purchased in 2012 by the very shrewd Facebook.

For more information, download our latest Social Media Statistics compendium.