Facebook CIO David Ebersman recently confirmed that teenagers from across the world are becoming increasingly less active on the social media site. Here’s some possible reasons why.

Earlier this month, Facebook CIO David Ebersman confessed that company bosses were worried over the fact that teenagers across the world are now increasingly becoming less active on the site.

With teenagers and youngsters in their early 20s constituting the backbone of the traffic to most social media sites, including of course Facebook; Ebersman and his company’s anxiety is totally justifiable.

“We did see a decrease in daily users, partly among younger teens,” Ebersman admitted while referring to the site’s traffic and overall usage from the 2nd and 3rd quarters of the running year. Facebook’s estimates were also reflected in a syndicated study carried out by the experts at GlobalWebIndex on behavior of digital consumers in 32 markets.

The study which included an extensive survey of teenagers across 30 countries, concluded that the number of teen users claiming to be active on the site had decreased to 56 per cent in Q3 compared to 76 per cent in Q1.

“There is a very clear story with the big winners being closed messaging and video-and-photo sharing apps,” said Tom Smith, CEO of GlobalWebIndex,Forbes reports.

“This is something that could be particularly harmful to Facebook because its core value lies in peer-to-peer community, messaging and photo sharing,” Smith added.

Even applications like the Facebook Messenger were bagging more active users during the second and third quarters compared to the number of active users the site was attracting.

“There is a clear, definitive shift to mobile in general,” Smith stated, “underlined by a large rise in Facebook’s mobile app, [up 69%], so the composition of Facebook is changing.”

However, the GlobelWebInex CEO said that such changes were less likely to have any formidable impact on the usage of Twitter – the other big name in the social media universe.

Apparently, the decrease in active Facebook users in the teenage community highlights the fact that youngsters these days are becoming increasingly attracted toward apps and social media platforms that help them go mobile. For example, a large proportion of young crowd in India, Southeast Asia and many other parts of the world are opting for instant messager platforms such as Whatsapp (recently collected statistics suggest that more than 11 billion chat messages are exchanged worldwide everyday using Whatsapp).

Similarly, WeChat which happens to be a rival of Whatsapp is pushing aggressively into markets like China with millions of mobile users.

Now, it remains interesting to see what new strategies Facebook adopts to in order to counter this new emerging challenge from mobile instant messaging apps.