Facebook officially over the hill?
Jinfo Blog

9th July 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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iStrategyLabs released its 2009 Facebook demographic and statistics report - http://digbig.com/5baath - to find that, horrors! The FB virtual corridors that once teemed with the 18-24 set are now filled with parents and grandparents. iStrategy found that 'There has been a staggering increase in the number of 55+ users - with total growth of 513.7% in in the last six month alone.' Furthermore, 'The most troubling statitics [sic] we’ve seen are that there are 16.5% less high school users, and 21.7% less college users. There have been rumors that these younger user groups are being aliented [sic] by their parents joining the service, and this data seems to prove it.' Spelling aside, it makes for good headlines…but it's not necessarily drawing the right conclusions. As first mentioned in a BusinessWeek blog (http://digbig.com/5baatj), the iStrategy Labs methodology relied on self reported "affiliations," both geographic and academic. Could be that as graduation gowns were put on in June, school affiliations were taken off. Another scenario is that students are no longer choosing to affiliate themselves with networks, perhaps to maintain privacy from their older relatives who are joining. The lessening importance of those networks is reflected by FB's recent decision to drop the geographic networks altogether (http://digbig.com/5baatk.) And keep in mind this analysis was run on US users only, who now comprise about a third of total Facebook users. I read some commentators who said that it was reflective of a migration of the cool kids to Twitter, but I can't see how that's possible. The two services are complementary, with Twitter acting as a real-time news feed of an individual's thoughts (however garbled) and Facebook is a hub of personal data and connections. Unless Twitter Profiles really get amped up in the coming months, I wouldn't expect it to pull many users away from their FB dependency. In the end, I wouldn't worry too much about the younger set abandoning Facebook. Making the service MORE appealing to older users doesn't necessarily have to diminish its appeal to younger users, who after all have invested a lot of time to trick out their profiles and find their friends. Given the privacy controls that Facebook has finally, belatedly, made easier for members, you can control whether Mom, Dad, or Junior sees your page, and act accordingly.

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