- U.K. professor Daniel Miller, discussing the results of an EU-funded study on social media use: "What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the U.K. is that Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it ... Parents have worked out how to use the site ... In response, the young are moving on to cooler things."
- Miller adds U.K. teens are reallocating their social media time to Twitter, (Facebook-owned) Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat, with none of those services fully replacing Facebook on their own. A recent Piper survey of U.S. teen social media use turned up similar findings.
- Worries about Facebook's teen engagement have been easy to find since the company disclosed on its Q3 CC it saw a Q/Q drop in U.S. teen daily active users. Sheryl Sandberg later insisted overall U.S. teen Facebook usage remains stable.
- The bigger question for Facebook: Is softening engagement among teens in certain markets simply the result of teen-specific issues (for example, not wanting to engage with a social network one's parents and other older relatives are on), or a leading indicator of broader issues (e.g. boredom, privacy concerns) that could affect engagement among other demographic groups?