If you have visited Facebook lately you may have noticed a change in it's users. They are getting older. Apparently the older crowd is jumping on the social networking bandwagon as well.
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An analytics company called
iStrategyLabs recently did a study on the demographics of the
Facebook users. The study was done between the dates of January 04, 2009 and July 04, 2009. The study showed that the number of users between the ages of 18-24 only grew 4.8% in that time period, while the number of users age 25-34 grew over 60%. What was even more surprising was that ages 35-54 grew 190.2% and ages 55 and older grew a whopping 513.7%.
The overall numbers showed that
Facebook no longer belongs to the 35-54 year old crowd. Instead it is the 25-34 year olds that dominate the
social networking website. The 25-34 year olds are in a close second, with the 18-24 year olds coming in third as the most popular age group, only ahead of the over 55 year olds. But don't count out the over 55 crowd yet as in 6 months, they went from 950.000 to 5.9 million users.
So, what does this mean for
Facebook? It means the ads on the
social networking site may be different now. A 40 year old is going to want to see different advertisements than a 19 year old. It also may mean that Facebook is becoming more of a professional
social networking site rather than a hang out for college kids.
Social networking is becoming hugely popular as a way to network with other professionals in the same line of work or with other professionals that you may be able to team up with for business adventures.
It appears that the according to these numbers, the face of
Facebook is changing and doing so at a rapid pace. There could be many reasons for this or it could simply be the older generations catching up with the latest craze. The thing that you have to remember is that these numbers are only an estimate and are not guaranteed to be the absolute truth. Some people do not fill in their age and some others will put in a false age, which can easily skew the results.
Next time you log in to
Facebook, you may just find that your 80 year old grandma now has her own page!