Your first assumption should be that your teenage child has at least one fake social media account that he or she keeps secret and that is filled with false information. The reasons for this vary, with some of them being for nefarious reasons and others for benign reasons. But, fake profile or not, what is it that teens are sharing on social media?
The Pew Research Center did some research on what teens are sharing online and found some very interesting facts.
Pictures
91% - Post pictures of themselves, which was just 79% in 2006. This rise is likely due to the increase in Smartphone camera and Internet connection technology.
School name
71% - Post the name of the school they attended, which was just 49% in 2006. School names are often used to locate friends on Facebook and FriendFinder, so this number has probably grown alongside Facebook popularity.
Home city
71% - Detail their current city or town, which is slightly more than in 61%. The slight rise is probably due to the fact that so many people have the same names that home towns/cities are used to find the right person.
Email address
53% - Display their email address on a page of their social media, which is up from 29% in 2006. This may be due to the increased sophistication of spam email/junk filters, making people feel more relaxed about giving out their email address.
Phone numbers
20% - Of people display a cell phone number on their social media profile, as opposed to just 2% in 2006. This is only one fifth of social media users, but is still too high. Part of this may be due to people being unaware of their security settings on social media, even though most claim that they are fully confidant in their security settings and their ability to manage them.
Facebook is the most popular social media site
You probably already knew this already, which means you may also assume that Facebook is the most popular social media site with teens too. There are a few figures for Facebook only, which you may find interesting.
Over 60% of teenage Facebook users have set their Facebook profiles to the private "Friends Only" setting, and claim to have a high amount of confidence in their settings. Such a high number of private profiles may suggest that unsolicited attendees are a problem on Facebook, and may also suggest that the privacy settings are helping to reduce online bullying.
Around 56% of teen Facebook users say that they find the security and privacy settings easy to use, and that they are happy with their privacy controls on Facebook. Around 33% of teen Facebook users say that the security and privacy settings are not easy, but are not too difficult either. Around 8% say that managing the privacy controls on Facebook is a little bit difficult, and 1% says that the whole process of setting security and privacy filters is very difficult.
