New Study Shows How Different Generations Use Facebook
Reports from Inside Facebook earlier this year have shown the growth in Facebook use amongst users over 35 and baby boomers especially. Now, a new study from Anderson Analytics shows how different generations are using social networking sites …
Context & Ripple Effects
The story lands on an arc already two years old: the New York Times flagged the graying of the web back in September 2007, and Inside Facebook's own reporting earlier in 2009 documented accelerating Facebook adoption among users over 35 and baby boomers specifically.
What is new here is third-party confirmation. Anderson Analytics' generational segmentation moves the claim from a single outlet's traffic observation to market-research footing — the kind of data brand advertisers and Facebook's sales team both need to justify spending against an audience no longer defined by college students.
First-order effects
- Advertisers gain an independent demographic map for targeting older cohorts on Facebook, reducing reliance on the platform's self-reported user numbers.
- Facebook gets research-backed ammunition for pitching brands beyond its original youth core, complementing its mid-2009 push to broaden sharing via email photo and video publishing.
Second-order effects
- Market-research firms such as Anderson Analytics become arbiters of social-network demographics, giving them a recurring franchise as platforms age and their audiences fragment by generation.
- Rival social networks face pressure to court the same over-35 and boomer segments, shifting competitive positioning from feature innovation toward demographic breadth.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networking consolidates from a youth subculture into mainstream mass media, with generational usage studies becoming standard planning inputs for media buyers and normalizing the comfort with personal disclosure that Facebook's five-year growth has already been credited with driving.
The trend: Social networks are aging into mainstream mass media, with independent research firms increasingly supplying the generational data that determines where advertising budgets flow.