Aging Social Media Audience


Posted: March 31st, 2009 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Social Media Opinion | No Comments

Is a social media strategy right for every organization?  My simple answer is “yes”.  For a longer version of that answer … read on.

The main concern among many individuals and businesses is whether the social media audience skews too young to be useful to … for instance … a company that produces products for the elderly.  My answer to that is two-fold:

  1. I have no research to back this up, but it seems reasonable to assume that a portion of the population purchasing products for the elderly actually consists of people buying the products for their parents.  Additionally, even if these “children” aren’t doing all of their parents’ shopping, they’re likely in a position where they can advise them on what products might be useful.
  2. The population of the social media universe is aging … rapidly.

This blog post addresses primarily the second point above.  I’ve seen this with my own eyes.  I was recently “friended” on Facebook by my mother-in-law. She’s 69 years old.

I will admit a considerable amount of shock and disbelief when I received the notification email from Facebook.  I knew my mother-in-law recently was given a laptop, but didn’t expect to use it beyond emailing her extended family.

This type of story is being heard all over these days, as people once thought to be excluded voluntarily or involuntarily from the social media universe are bullying their way in.  Time magazine recently published an article that explains why social media sites like Facebook are actually better for old fogies than for younger folks.  The article was written with the tongue firmly in cheek, but it makes some interesting and extremely valid points.

If that justification weren’t enough, it seems social media sites are beginning to pop up that are actually designed from the ground up for the older population.  While I question whether these sites will survive long term, you have to assume (hope?) the firms behind these sites did some research that proves there’s an audience out there.

One final point I can make on this topic is that, going forward, the elderly and the retired population will be made up of people who are much more comfortable with computers.  People reaching retirement age in the next 5 to 10 years will have had more than a little contact with the Internet during their working years.  The reason this is relevent is obviously that they’ll be more likely to be comfortable visiting sites like Facebook and Twitter (or whatever is the hot site in 5-10 years).  You always hear that people who are on social media sites have too much time on their hands.  Who has more time on their hands than a retiree?

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