Facebook may be losing ground among its older users, according to Inside Facebook.
Over the past few months, baby boomers joined the popular social networking site in droves, creating some inter-generational tensions in the process. From February and March, though, to April and May, that trend seems to have reversed. According to data that Facebook supplies to its advertisers, the 55-to-65-year-old age group's activity has drastically declined over the past couple months (by 651,080, to be exact), making it the only demographic to experience an overall drop in numbers.
The data is not accompanied by any reasons why baby boomers are quitting, but Inside Facebook wonders if the over-55 set just hasn't figured out how to use the real-time updates that were implemented on social network's recent facelift. Then again, it could be all the phishing scams that have surfaced on the service lately. We think it might just be because half the time we try to send messages on social network, we get an error message telling us to log in again (very annoying), or any of a myriad of other reasons to quit Facebook.
While their parents seem to be fleeing Facebook, 18-to-25-year olds are spending more time on the site than ever. Since the end of March, nearly 2 million new members have joined up in that age bracket. The root of these developing Facebook trends? We'd bet that those Gen Y-ers, finding themselves unemployed and out of school, are aiming to waste some time and distract themselves. Meanwhile, we'd guess that their parents, in light of their companies' tightening belts, are laying off the during-office-hours browsing.
How about you? Are you still on Facebook? Have you thought about quitting?
No comments:
Post a Comment