Back in October, Facebook CFO David Ebersman revealed that young teens were visiting the world's largest social network slightly less frequently than before. The revelation ignited a firestorm that led many to speculate that teens were fleeing Facebook in droves and the site would even lose 80 percent of its users by 2017.
As it turns out, however, Facebook may not have a teen flight issue after all - at least according to results from a recent poll conducted by Forrester.
Of the more than 4,500 online youth aged 12 to 17 polled, nearly 80 percent said they use Facebook - twice as many as Pinterest, Snapchat or Tumblr and more than Instagram and WhatsApp combined. Among those that do use Facebook, 28 percent said they're on it "all the time" versus other possible responses like "about once a day" or "at least a few times each day."
Interestingly enough, Forrester's poll shows that YouTube has an even higher adoption rate than Facebook although teens use Facebook more frequently than they do Google's video sharing website. These two sites tower above all others in terms of overall adoption.
Forrester concludes, just as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg noted late last year, that the social network isn't facing a teen problem. At the time, Sandberg said the reaction to Ebersman's comments had been blown out of proportion and that overall US teen usage of Facebook remains stable.