In an interview with
Mike Isaac of AllThingsD.com, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg claimed the media over-reacted to Facebook CFO Ebersman’s comment during a recent earnings call when he mentioned the site was seeing a drop in daily usage among teens.
Sandberg told Isaac, “As we said on the earnings call, overall US teen usage of Facebook remains stable. The vast majority of US teens are on Facebook. And the majority of US teens use Facebook almost every day.”
Sandberg went on to say the challenge for Facebook is the fact they have been around for ten years now and are no longer the “shiny cool” thing. She said they’re not trying to be the coolest or newest, but the most useful.
Isaac asked the COO about the company’s recent attempt to acquire Snapchat. Sandberg avoided any direct comments about Facebook’s relationship with the growing social media platform and remained on message. “Social sharing, personal sharing, using your mobile device to share is exploding,” said Sandberg, “We and other services are continuing to grow because of it.”
Other conversation topics included whether or not Facebook would increase ads in the News feed and new ad products like the mobile app installation ads. For existing ad products, Sandberg said Facebook’s goal wasn’t to increase the number of ads in the News feed, but the “quality” of ads, as well as creating better targeting tools for advertisers.
Sandberg was unable to offer any ad revenue figures, claiming Facebook doesn’t break out revenue on specific ad products, but did say that the people developing the mobile app install ads have seen a “really high” ROI.
When asked about the company scaling back on Facebook Gifts, Sandberg said that 80 percent of Facebook Gift transactions were for gift cards, so they decided to, “Focus on what was working.” She did say Facebook is a “large player” in direct response advertising and have witnessed a significant increase in spending among e-commerce companies.
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