Your Grandparents' Facebook?

Just read an article from emarketer discussing the prevalence of Baby Boomers on Facebook. I thought this was relevant to some of our class discussions because we were questioning if social networking sites become irrelevant or uncool if your parents use them too.

Boomers’ social network presence has grown steadily since Deloitte’s 2007 survey, when only 30% said they maintained a profile on a social network. In that period, millennials’ use of social profiles remained fairly steady—and heavily penetrated—at 71% in 2007 and 77% in 2009. Facebook is the favorite social network for boomers, as both comScore and Anderson Analytics data show.

So baby boomers are on Facebook. That's one thing, but a surprising Anderson Analytics surveys showed that 90% of the "World War II" generation currently using social networks are also use Facebook. WOW. Of course I would expect older people to gravitate towards Facebook over MySpace, but don't both networks seem way too youth oriented for people over 62?

I have trouble picturing my parents using Facebook, not because my parents couldn't use it - they're quite proficient, but because they wouldn't want to use it... and I'm totally fine with that. But my grandparents????

Apparently people are people. Boomers and the WWII generation want to make the same family, friend, and co-worker connections that younger people want.

So everybody's using Facebook now. OK, we know that. But what does that entail? Facebook's own data HERE is pretty astonishing.

# More than 350 million active users
# 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
# More than 35 million users update their status each day
# More than 55 million status updates posted each day
# More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
# More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
# More than 3.5 million events created each month
# More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
# More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
# Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

User data is pretty crazy as well:

# Average user has 130 friends on the site
# Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
# Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
# Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
# Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
# Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
# Average user is invited to 3 events per month
# Average user is a member of 12 groups

Average user spends 55 minutes a day?!!! What! Must be a lot of bored cube dwellers. Which is suggested HERE.

Use of social networking sites in general (of which Facebook makes up the vast majority of usage) cost employers upwards of $2.25 billion each year in lost employee productivity. It’s forcing many companies to question whether or not to ban the site all together.