Facebook Isn’t Losing Teen Users, Says COO Sheryl Sandberg

It was reported recently that Facebook use amongst teens was starting to decline. Quite a lot was written about this as people speculated that perhaps the world’s biggest social network was no longer “cool” enough for most teens to use. During Facebook’s last earnings call, CFO David Ebersman said that the company “did see a decrease in daily users partly among younger teens.” These few words sparked hundreds of articles about how Facebook might be becoming irrelevant for younger teens. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says that the reaction to Ebersman’s comment “has been blown out of proportion” and that the overall teen usage of Facebook in the U.S. “remains stable.” To be fair to Ebersman, he did say prior to making the comment about declining teen usage that “youth usage among U.S. teens was stable overall from Q2 to Q3.”

Sandberg reiterates that the “majority of U.S. teens use Facebook almost every day,” and that the vast majority of them are on the social network. She made these comments in an interview with AllThingsD, where she added that Facebook’s challenge is not to be the newest, which it obviously can’t be seeing as how its almost a decade old. She says that “we’re not trying to be the coolest. And we’re not trying to be the newest.” Facebook is trying to be the most useful, and that’s something that CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg stands behind. When quizzed about a possible acquisition of Snapchat, for which it reportedly offered $3 billion in cash, Sandberg neither confirms that an offer was put on the table nor denies that one might be made in the future.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook, Snapchat