Facebook Can Rest Easy. Nobody Does Old People Better.
Younger generations will grow up and need the same kind of services that their parents are getting from the social media platform.
Photographer: Chris Delmas/AFP
Does Facebook Inc.'s declining relevance with teenagers really pose an existential threat to the company? After all, Facebook’s most loyal users are people over age 30 and today's teens are tomorrow's 30-somethings -- if they don't start using Facebook while they're young there's no guarantee they will later in life.
But Facebook today serves a different purpose than it did a decade ago, and would-be challengers like Snapchat and TikTok aren't well-positioned to threaten the social media platform’s dominance with older users. To do that they’d probably have to change their products significantly to more closely resemble Facebook, perhaps turning off their core base of young people.