There has been some heated discussions about teens and their decline in Facebook usage in 2013. Warnings that Facebook will earn its spot as the next “has been” social media website alongside Myspace are circulating the web. According to a study by Socialbakers, total reach of Facebook brand pages among teens ages 13-17 fluctuated throughout the year but ended 2013 in about the same realm it began. The teen’s age group was the only one in the study that did not have a substantial increase in reach in 2013 (29.1%).

So why did reach among teens remain stagnant in 2013? A very high level of market saturation among 12-17 year olds undoubtedly played into it. eMarketer estimates that “95.9% of social networkers ages 12-17 used Facebook in 2013.” With numbers that high, remaining stagnant is not so bad, however, future decrease is likely.

In Facebook’s Q3 2013 earnings call CFO, David Ebersman acknowledged that Facebook “did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens.” Facebook’s rapid growth among older age groups is a big turn off to teens. Looking back at the Socailbakers study as noted by Marketing Charts, reach among ages 45-54 was up 69%, reach among ages 55-64 was up 71%, and reach among the study’s oldest age group (65 and up) was a whopping 74% higher at the end of 2013 than it was in the beginning. With most teens looking for independence, having their parents and grandparents on Facebook compromises its ability to give them that.

As a result, teens are not necessarily ending their relationships with Facebook, but are expanding the number of social media sites they use. According to a study by GlobalWebIndex, mobile chat services, video-sharing apps, and photo-sharing apps are becoming the new cool thing. Luckily, Facebook has its various acquisitions keeping it in the teen social media game. Facebook owns Instagram which has seen an 85% increase in teen usage in 2013. Most recently, Facebook announced that it would be acquiring the mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion. WhatsApp had an 81% increase in usage among teens in 2013.

To learn more about Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition, check out BIA/Kelsey‘s post WhatsApp with $19B Acquisitions These Days? by Mike Boland.

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Local/social leaders from Facebook, Yelp and Twitter took the stage at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, this week to discuss what IAB President Randall Rothenberg called “the mobile/social local real-time medium that does not have a name.”

Facebook’s Tim Kendall, director of monetization, said Facebook has essentially introduced “marketing on the social graph” by tracking its unique information, such as “pages,” “events,” “like,” “share” and “connect.”  “We’re getting pretty good at showing you ‘who matters to me’ on news feed and topics,” he said.

Advertising on the site is now in full play. “We have created a social marketing experience that we think it the most interesting social advertising on the Web,” he said. And Facebook’s advertising success is demonstrably strong. “Our click to conversion rate is two to three times other sites. Social wins every time.”

Kendall added that Facebook’s effective CPM ends up being “a couple of dollars,” but that advertisers also come in via the service’s self-serve advertising, which is priced on a flat rate basis.

Jed Nachman from Yelp estimated that the site’s effective CPM was $200. One example, Little Star Pizza in San Francisco, for instance, had 1,500 looks (and presumably pays $300 for the ad). Nachman also noted that on average, Yelp users look at 2-4 reviews before making any decisions.

Meanwhile, Twitter is preparing to launch its first ad product next month, according to Anamitra Banerji, who is “Product Management, Monetization.” Banerji said his prior experience at Overture told him to “innovate really, really quickly before anyone else comes up with it.”

Banerji added that people should “be focused on what you are doing and not worry about what people are doing around you.” He also noted that Twitter is a distributed product. “We don’t see ourselves as a Web site,” he said.

Weighing in on social during a separate session at IAB was MySpace Co-President Jason Hirschhorn. Hirschhorn noted that MySpace is refocused on entertainment and music. “We’re not jettisoning our roots as a social network. But our fans want to be entertained. Not everyone is a publisher.”

Hirschhorn spoke admiringly of Facebook, which has basically deposed MySpace as a leader in social media with almost four times the traffic — 128 million uniques versus 400 million uniques. “The media community itself has its social graph on Facebook,” he said. “But there is a completely different behavior and mind-set you are tapping into when you are a brand marketer.” He noted that MySpace still has information on 13 million bands, and a “16-34 type audience.”

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