London, England – Financial and mobile issues might prove the least of Mark Zuckerberg’s problems claims a report out this week from top ten award winning independent market research agency Conquest into the social media habits of 14-24 year olds. It reveals that Facebook’s core audience- teenagers-are starting to fall out of love with the website and that activity may have peaked amid a mounting groundswell of dissatisfaction and concerns over privacy and bullying.

While Facebook’s pre-eminence is assured in the short term, “Fuicide” (the attempted or successful deletion of the account) is on the rise as are complaints about the damaging impact of regular and prolonged Facebook use. Grievances triggered by Facebook’s culture include obsession with appearance and acceptance of sexually provocative behaviour; increased negative self-esteem, vulnerability to bullying, depression caused by jealousy and comparing one’s life to peers and inability to project one’s true self. Conquest used its avatar driven methodology Metaphorix to capture respondent’s authentic feelings about social media.

The Evidence :

• Over 30% of the group have had sufficiently bad experience online to recently attempt or succeed in deleting their accounts, with 13% of regular users planning to lower their presence over the coming 12 months.
• Concerns about privacy, bullying and Facebook ‘making me feel down about life’ are the most cited reasons:-
• Specifically: vulnerability to bullying was stated by 44% as reason for feeling unhappy about using the site, as well as increased negative self-esteem (28%); depression sparked by unfavourable comparisons with other people’s lives (25%); and plain jealousy of others (24%).
• Nearly half of all young women (45%) felt that Facebook intensifies an obsession with appearance. Moreover, 33% of males concurred, with over a quarter stating that it boosts the acceptance of sexually provocative presentation.
•  A growing frustration was articulated with the Facebook culture’s inability to enable authentic expression of character. This is offset by young men’s relish at the opportunity afforded to exaggerate the facts about themselves, with 44% admitting to this.
• Generally speaking it is unsurprisingly young women who suffer more from the adverse effects of Facebook than their male counterparts with more female deleters and complainants of harmful consequences.

New and different sites (like Pinterest and fashism ) have experienced phenomenal growth in 2012 while Myspace has remained a stalwart for those musically minded, challenging Facebook’s monolithic status. Commented David Penn MD of Conquest and inventor of the Metaphorix methodology: “Could the future of social media be more niche networks catering for particular interests- those which users select in order to feel more comfortable, more inspired and ultimately more themselves?”

Conquest canvassed 300 regular Facebook users aged between 14 and 24 years old, equally balanced by gender and nationally representative on region.

Image Courtesy of  Vincos

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Some question the potential that social media has to offer, while others are utilizing and benefiting through what social media has to offer. Social media may be one of the greatest tools in marketing today, for several reasons.

Two of the most commonly used social media pages are Facebook and Twitter. Most companies are starting to pick up on their benefits of having social media accounts set up within these sites. According to InsideFacebook.com, Facebook has 712.4 million users worldwide in September and Twitter has 100 million active users.

Facebook is being used as a form of communication and interaction between the consumer and the brand. Brand pages allow not only the brand to interact with consumers, but also for others to review and share their feelings towards the brand. From this feedback, companies are creating more of an interpersonal relationship with their customers.

Marketers also, are able to target a certain audience with paid ads, ensuring that these are placed on the page that fits their defined audience. This ensures that the ad is appearing primarily to people who are more likely to click the ad. Twitter is another great tool that elicits some confusion. Twitter can be used as a mouthpiece for the company, which makes it excellent for PR purposes.

On Twitter, companies share news regarding their company, this allows followers to keep up with said company. By giving your brand a voice on Twitter, Twitter will categorize your Page and place your page under recommendation for followers, related to the content posted by users on twitter.

Through Facebook and Twitter, companies are creating a niche for themselves. It’s possible to get an understanding of what these brands represent and how these companies want consumers to view their brands. Social media is a great way to provide customer service to followers, and keep an audience engaged and updated at the same time.

That is why it is important for company pages to always respond to consumers’ posts. In a study done by Evolve24, about 83% of Consumers have positive feelings when contacted from a company from a tweet a user posts. Traditional marketing is slowly declining, yet it is not to say that is dying out.

There is still a lot of power in traditional marketing, that may be too hard for social media to convey. If a brand were to reposition itself, television ads would be a powerful medium to display this new position for the brand. Combined, these two create a powerful voice and should be included in successful marketing campaigns.

The more impressions from, traditional marketing and inbound marketing, the better odds are of being noticed by potential clients.

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With the revelation that Facebook is using facial recognition technology to provide tagging suggestions by default, serious controversy has been sparked among Facebook users. Lots of debate has been going on regarding the available new technology. Some think it will be great, while others say they are not fond of this new feature and want to leave Facebook immediately.

Basically, Facebook is using facial recognition technology to suggest tags to users who upload photos. In other words, Facebook helps users automatically identify people in their photos, encouraging friends to tag them so others can gain access to the images more easily.

Facebook’s purpose is to make the tagging process quicker and simpler as part of greater effort on Facebook’s behalf to improve the entire photo uploading, browsing and tagging process. With the facial recognition technology, Facebook needs to apply a newly uploaded photos feature.

However, “yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth,” said Graham Cluley, of the British Internet security firm Sophos. With Facebook’s facial recognition, if you’re not careful, it might identify your face to people who are familiar with it, as well as to their friends, who might not be.

The real problem is not that your face is going to be recognized by everyone — it is your total lack of control over how you can be tagged. “Many people feel distinctly uncomfortable about a site like Facebook learning what they look like, and using that information without their permission.”

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington Dc, criticized the way Facebook had automatically opted users into its facial recognition system by default. Furthermore, with Facial Recognition software, Facebook users could have given their permission in their privacy settings for Facebook without intent.

Following the criticism of Tag Suggestion, Facebook said “we should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them.” It seems that Facebook frequently pushes its users to reveal more of their privacy online by implementing new features automatically.

Many of Facebook’s users feel uncomfortable and confused when the many different kinds of Facebook tool invade their private life to this degree — without their control. However, if you find yourself in the photo and you don’t want Facebook to automatically identify you, what you can do to ignore this application?

Luckily, Facebook users can disable the feature by turning off the “suggest photos of me to friends” option in their Privacy Setting page even though it’s quite a complicated process.

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In April 2010 there was an event on Facebook that attracted more then 60,000 RSVPs.

It wasn’t a concert, or a sale, or a protest.

It was what appeared to be a house party, started by an unassuming looking young woman named Kate.

It created not only the 60,000 responses, but a huge variety of other facebook groups – “Is going to try to get with Kate at Kate’s Party”, “We met at Kate’s Party”, “Kate’s party would have gone off” and “Osama Bin Laden is at Kate’s Party”.

And it turns out it was all a hoax – Adelaide man, Dave Thorne, created the event to highlight the failings of Facebook privacy settings.

It became a huge sign of how quickly information can be spread by social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.

Currently there is another event that has surpassed Kate’s house party in terms of guests.

As of March 14, there are over 100,000 people who have responded to Jess Cooper’s 16th open house party.

The event includes an address and phone number, which the party event says is Jess Coopers’.

Facebook took down the page for Kate’s party after it reached 60,000 guests, and it was confirmed to be a hoax.

It is not yet known whether this new event is another hoax, or a powerful warning to always be careful of privacy settings.

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