One of my New Year's Resolutions was to blog every single day. I was pretty good about it for a while, but clearly I've slacked a bit. Truth is, I have been having internet problems at home. For some reason I can't seem to get my service to work. Thankfully I have a neighbor that doesn't use a password to protect their signal and I can steal theirs.
I work in the media and I have a lot of friends that work in the same, or similar, fields. They hold positions in TV, radio, PR and Marketing. All of these require a lot of work on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. I've always been a firm believer that those above my head put way too much emphasis on them. I think they overestimate how many people actually use them for information. A few of my friends and I got to talking the other night about these sites. Our final summation is that Facebook has hit its peak and isn't getting any higher.
I look to people like my brother and sister for examples in my argument. My brother is currently a senior in college and my sister is almost done with her first year of dental school. Both of them are in the demographic which Facebook was created for yet neither of them seems to have any interest in using it. Sure, they both have accounts and from time to time they update them. I spent about an hour looking for recent pictures of my brother on his page and came up nearly empty. He's a college senior that is most likely doing stupid things that are totally camera worthy, but there are no pictures of him from the last six months. My sister on the other hand uses Facebook in a much more conservative manner. She removed most of her pictures and updates because she didn't want to be judged by them in her dental school world. I thought she was overreacting, but I can see her point.
My sister told me that her interest in it is fading fast. She uses it more as an email address. There are a lot of people that she is friends with on Facebook that she doesn't have contact info for. With Facebook she doesn't need it. Who needs an address book when you can just type someone's name into a site. I thought about my own usage and realized I do the same thing. I post status updates from time to time that I hope will create some form of debate that I can use on my radio show. I'll also post pictures if I was out with a group of friends that way all of them can have a copy. I could email them but it would take forever. A simple photo gallery is much easier to piece together.
I saw some statistics for Facebook usage but I think they're a little off. It said that there were about 45 million users in the U.S. between the ages of 18-24. According to the census estimates, there are only about 20 million people between the ages of 20-24 in the United States. Clearly something doesn't make sense here. Then again, there are a lot of people that have multiple accounts. You may be saying to yourself that I'm a conspiracy theorist. I can assure you that my boss has actually asked me to create different accounts so as to help boost our station's statistics. I know for a fact that other people do this. Let's also not forget that there are many pages that are inactive. I still have 2 myspace accounts that I never deleted but haven't checked in 3 years. Technically, I still count as a myspace user. 2 actually.
The biggest area of growth for Facebook appears to be with women in the 35-54 age group. Otherwise known as stay at home moms who would rather kill time on the computer than dusting book shelves. This will be problematic for Facebook. As we all know, the younger demos create a fad and the older demos kill it. Once the older age groups grab on to something, the younger groups run for the hills and find a new place to hang.
The big question now is, where are people going? That's a different post for a different day.
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