Millionaires Have No Time for Facebook
A new poll suggests that a majority of millionaires have signed up for social media sites. There is just one problem: They don't have time to actually use them. — The poll from SEI Wealth Network, a wealth-advisory firm, showed that 70% …
Context & Ripple Effects
Skepticism about what Facebook accounts are actually worth is old ground in this corpus: the platform was called a [[$5b waste of time]] back in 2007, dissected again in 2008 as "the problem with Facebook", and by late 2009 the New York Times was documenting users who deliberately defriend Facebook to break their dependence on it. The SEI Wealth Network poll adds a demographic twist to that arc: about 70% of millionaires have signed up, yet most report no time to use the sites.
First-order effects
- For Facebook, the poll separates registration from engagement among high-net-worth users — its headline signup numbers overstate how much attention it actually captures from the affluent demographic advertisers pay premiums to reach.
- For wealth-advisory firms like SEI Wealth Network, the data is client-facing ammunition: advisors can frame social media as an account to maintain, not a habit to build, for time-poor clients.
Second-order effects
- Brands and marketers targeting million-dollar households face an attribution problem — paying for reach into a segment that signs up but does not scroll pushes them toward channels with measurable engagement instead.
- Facebook's push that same month toward utility rather than leisure — one-time passwords for secure access, privacy fixes after the app-data investigation, and the planned Bing social-search tie-up — matters more if casual or dormant users need a concrete reason to log in at all.
Third-order effects
- The durable shift the poll points toward is a market that prices platforms on engaged minutes rather than registered accounts — a distinction that will grow sharper as signup saturation makes raw member counts less meaningful per demographic.
- If affluent, time-constrained users treat social profiles as passive presence while engaging elsewhere, platforms may bifurcate into identity layers people maintain and attention markets they actually inhabit.
The trend: Social media adoption is decoupling from usage in high-value demographics, forcing the industry to sell engagement rather than membership.