Teens deserting, fleeing, leaving and running from Facebook in droves 

And other exaggerated,baseless nonsense from tech reporters

You heard it here first. Wait, no you didn’t. You probably read it on Mashable. Or on Techcrunch. Or on Business Insider. Or on Huffpo. Or on Yahoo. Or on ABC News. Or on myriad sites each looking to get the first word in on why teens are dropping from Facebook like flies and where they’re apparently going.

And it’s all rubbish. It’s puffery. Some of the headlines haven’t even correctly quoted the statement which launched a thousand tech reporters into a frenzy. So what was actually said?

Usage of Facebook among U.S. teens overall was stable” from the second quarter of 2013 to the third quarter but we did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens [my emphasis].
Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman.

So, despite having pretty much full market penetration across teens over 13 in the US, the number of daily active users among younger teens has decreased. We have no idea by how much, whether this is an ongoing downward trend or likely to recover, nor do we know why it’s happened. In short: pretty much everything beyond this is baseless speculation.

It gets worse. Facebook users are fleeing to Whatsapp. Why? Because Whatsapp now has 350 million monthly active users. We’re not seeing how ‘monthly active use’ is defined for Whatsapp, just as we rarely see what ‘monthly active use’ is for a user of Twitter or what an ‘active user’ is on Google+. It’s really not good enough. It’s almost painful to watch as a marketer because cynical PR announcements designed to paper over audience cracks are repeated verbatim. Of course, it is a double-edged sword - as Ebersman is surely now aware - and reporters looking to make a name for themselves are eager to pounce on any apparent frailty in order to provide some insight.

Any time any network provides us with audience figures we should take them with a pinch of salt. We should be asking what their fluffy terms mean and then provide insight. Out of all the big social networks, Facebook is really the only one providing robust user data. This leaves it open to attack but also puts it into a much stronger position. There is huge daily active use on the platform and it keeps climbing. The data alongside the earnings report is incredibly impressive — read the full report at Facebook’s Newsroom. We should be challenging Google, Twitter, Whatsapp and any other platform giant to provide equally-robust usage reporting.

What if it is dropping and is a long-term trend? This will be interesting to see and if it’s the case, Facebook has 3-4 years to figure out how to bring these teens — presumably at that point heading into their twenties — back into the fold or how to better keep younger users. If younger teens do end up going back to the platform when they’re a few years older, then this shouldn't be a huge concern for Facebook. If younger teens are leaving and in high numbers without returning, then Facebook is in trouble. But only greater access to data will shed more light on this.