In an age when people are encouraged to collect hundreds of Facebook "friends" and thousands of Twitter followers, some social media users, particularly young ones, are going smaller.
Yes, Facebook and Twitter remain the juggernauts of social sharing -- Facebook with more than 1.2 billion active users and Twitter with more than 240 million of its own.
But over the past couple of years, it's been smaller social sharing and messaging tools, most of them mobile apps, that have gotten the most buzz and gained the most users. These services encourage users to target personalized messages to individuals or small groups instead of broadcasting posts to larger networks of people.
That doesn't mean folks are ditching Facebook for the silly photos of Snapchat or the 6-second videos of Vine. But these emerging social hangouts increasingly are where young users are communicating with each other.
"I think it is too early to say that they're abandoning the larger social networks, but certainly the audience for those networks is now fragmented," said Shayla Thiel-Stern, a journalism professor at the University of Minnesota who focuses on digital media and culture.
According to a GlobalWebIndex survey from last fall, the two fastest-growing apps used by teens were Vine, which lets users share brief video clips, and WeChat, a Chinese mobile text and voice messaging app. Usage of WeChat had increased a whopping 1,021% from the beginning of 2013.
Among those same teens, 56% said they were active on Facebook, compared to 76% at the beginning of the year.
"We did see a decrease in daily users, partly among younger teens," Facebook chief financial officer David Ebersman acknowledged during an earnings call at the end of last year.
That's no surprise, according to Thiel-Stern.
"First, young people are always looking for the coolest new thing, and now that their parents and grandparents are on Facebook, it's certainly not a cool new thing," she said. "Some of it is social currency, in general.
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