Facebook Grows Old: Goodbye Trendy Demographics
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg does all in his power to stop the media from comparing his “social graph” to New Corp.’s MySpace, a lowly social network from his learned perspective. Despite Zuckerberg’s exhortations and Facebook’s recent growth spurt, MySpace nevertheless looms large and Facebook remains solidly in number two position in the battle for online friending.
Facebook presently leads in Web “cred,” however, so any Facebook news is inevitably good news. comScore declares “open registration at facebook.com spurs 89 percent visitor growth versus last year.”
Facebook is getting kudos for driving a “demographic composition of the site” that more closley resembles that of the total Internet audience. The “flood of new traffic from teenagers and adults,” however, means that Facebook will also more closely resemble the demographics of MySpace!
What’s more, the “old folks” now out number the youngins at Facebook. Is that really a good thing? When MySpace met with the same aging effect last year due to more mainstream adoption of its property, the number one social network was derided for losing the youthful glow so cherished by marketers.
Facebook now finds itself in the same youth no longer rules social networking boat. Will marketers balk? After all, Facebook gears its entire advertiser pitch around a claim to offer the “ideal” audience of “youth trend-setters” critical for brand success:
Young adults are the primary trend drivers in our society. Marketing to young adults on their own terms is critical for success. Facebook offers relevant and integrated advertising opportunities to engage the tech-savvy youth audience. We can help you develop the ideal Facebook advertising solution that reaches an active audience of youth trend-setters and influencers.
Mark Zuckerberg may still be viewed as the Web’s trend-setter, his Facebookers, though, are showing their not so trendy mainstream age.
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Pingback by Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin » Facebook, Twitter Rule? Get a REAL (social networking) Life! — July 6, 2007 @ 5:31 am
I’m a young person who just got older. Age-ist moaning is not fit for society today. I might as well complain about all the young people on Facebook, who don’t have the buying power of the established older people and are just clogging up the attempts of the corporations to suck money from those who have it
Let’s not try to drive a wedge between elements of society. Old and young alike can have fun with Facebook and I would call that a strength of the service.
Comment by John Netherwood — July 6, 2007 @ 9:31 am
It’s an interesting development but marketers are so often missing a trick when they ignore the older demographic. Facebook seems to be appealing to people who want to avoid MySpace and to ignore this, indeed to make any attempt to counter it, would perhaps misunderstand its growing user base.
Comment by Dom Conlon — July 6, 2007 @ 11:45 am
So what ? These sites are like nightclubs, usage will peak and fall away rapidly after a year to eighteen months. Users who want to follow “trends” will switch to another site - there is no “brand loyalty” involved.
Comment by Tom — July 6, 2007 @ 12:11 pm
It’s quite sad to me that these days the world sees interesting social developments like Facebook and MySpace solely as a way to market and advertise. Here’s hoping Wikipedia and sites like SourceForge don’t follow suit.
Comment by Marsvin — July 6, 2007 @ 3:01 pm
As a creator of a new (and currently very tiny) social networking site, I know that it would be easy to use it to generate Advertising revenue. However, I am not going to do this, and would like to keep it completely without adverts. The only way this is possible would be to charge for a premium service, at £4.99 a month (about $10, With reductions for longer term contracts) - what do people think about that? Would you be willing to pay for features like an online address book and diary, games, etc, that are all available on your phone as well as your PC? If not, then I’m afraid sites won’t exist without the revenue generated by adverts.
If you are interested, It’s free to register and a lot of the functionality is free. It’s currently on a pre-release, so hasn’t yet got all the features, but you can register now and set up a profile and account if you wish!
Comment by Chris Lewis — July 6, 2007 @ 4:59 pm
[…] GET REAL! Facebook is on a mission, a who needs MySpace PLUS who needs Google mission. Bolstered by partner in data arms comScore’s affirmation that Facebook is indeed on track to take over the Web’s traffic, (see Facebook Grows Old: Goodbye Trendy Demographics), Facebook also is waving “internal” search stats to crown itself the one and only “most used people search engine on the Web.” […]
Pingback by Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin » Facebook Search Engine: Who Needs Google PageRank! — July 6, 2007 @ 7:01 pm
Facebook will still be able to maintain its demographic profile for advertisers by dint of its unique structure. The university- and school-related networks will be available for targeting on their own should an advertiser wish to do so. Adding older, non-academic users will simply increase advertising mix possibilities, but since everyone is kept on a network ‘island’, so to speak, the audience will not become more ‘blurred’ as it grows, but have its demographic groups remain distinct enough to be useful.
So I think you’re being a bit pessimistic.
Comment by Anne A — July 7, 2007 @ 7:42 am
“These sites are like nightclubs, usage will peak and fall away rapidly after a year to eighteen months.”
Unlikely. Users (at least those before they opened registration to everyone) have a lot of social investment in facebook. Although user pages and perhaps friend networks could be recreated easily on another site, the huge amount of tagged photos could not. A new website would have to have significant advantages to convince people to move all their photos and retag them.
Comment by Tim — July 7, 2007 @ 10:09 am
What’s the problem here? Old media thinking doesn’t work in this environment.
Facebook isn’t a magazine or a TV station: it’s a social network. It doesn’t have one audience with narrow demographics: it has users.
They cover a huge swath of the online population. Using Facebook, they can group themselves together along lines of interest, demographics and geography. The ‘young’, ‘trend drivers’ are still there - and they’re easy to identify.
With magazines, it’s the content that is the attraction. With Facebook, it’s the users that are the attraction. But with Facebook (and other social networks) you have the opportunity target advertising.
What’s more, you can target advertising *behaviourally*. Want to find the *real* trend drivers (the ones who consistently start up groups that other people want to join)? Facebook knows who they are.
Successful marketing means setting aside old media thinking and realising that sites like Facebook let you market in totally different ways.
Comment by Giles Colborne — July 7, 2007 @ 2:38 pm
I can imagine the old folks signing up but surely thats only their younger friends signing them up for them?
I heard stories that there are professional web profilers nowadays who get paid to create a webpresence for those less tech savy. myspace, facebook, bebo. e.t.c.
Comment by Jimm — July 7, 2007 @ 7:58 pm
[…] The new demographics spurred blogger/industry commentator Donna Bogatin to speculate: “Facebook now finds itself in the same youth no longer rules social networking boat. Will marketers balk? […]
Comment by Jeremy Geelan — July 8, 2007 @ 7:15 am
So marketeers like young people? Are those the same peniless teens, indebted students and first-time housebuyers who are
desparately saving to start a family?
Whereas older people have higher paid jobs, established credit records and once the kids have left home, much higher disposable incomes.
I reckon the merketing people simply don’t know how to adress these people and therefore fall back on the easy meat. Maybe once merketing types start actually doing some work and discover what the older demographic want and how to press their buttons, they will discover that older poepl are where the money really is.
Comment by Pete — July 8, 2007 @ 5:54 pm
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