Only 14% Of U.S. Teens Say Facebook Is Most Important, But Nearly Half Still Use It

Another day, another survey about American teens’ use of social media. The latest, released today by investment bank Piper Jaffray, sounds like bad news for Facebook: only 14% of U.S. teenagers pick the social network as the most important social network.

And that percentage is slipping, according to Piper Jaffray, which releases its “Taking Stock With Teens” survey twice a year. In the spring of 2013, 33% of teens surveyed cited Facebook as most important. Last year it was 23%.

Instagram, owned by Facebook, was the top choice of 32%. About 24% picked Twitter as most important; Snapchat, new to the survey question, was the choice of 13%, narrowly trailing Facebook in fourth place.

But it’s far from clear that teenagers are abandoning Facebook. Last week, the Pew Research Center released a survey that indicated that the network remains the No. 1 social media choice for U.S. teens, with 71% of those ages 13 to 17 using it.

Piper Jaffray, which didn’t release the age range of its 6,200-person sample (other than to say the average age was 16), noted that 47% of they teens it surveyed said they use Facebook. That figure is 2 percentage points higher than the Spring of 2014. (Seventy-five percent of teens say they use Instagram and 68% use Snapchat.)