Facebook is getting older, much older. According to facebook’s own estimates, the number of high school and college students has declined 15% and 20% respectively in a mere six months. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site.
As a site that started initially for college students, this comes as a shock. Where have all the kids gone?
Anyone can go through Facebook’s self-serve advertising program and see the user demographics numbers the company estimates now. However, iStrategyLabs captured that data six months ago and saved it for comparison. The changes have been dramatic.
As you can see in the chart above, young people by age are up a small amount, but young people by school level are down. Users with undeclared education levels are way up, implying that many high school and college students may simply no longer be listing their schools at all on the site. It’s no secret that facebook is deviating from its original demographic of school aged kids, but this shows us that advertisers may be more interested in a users age group than their school level.
The chart also shows the dramatic spike in older users. This could mean totally new possibilities for advertisers, but what does it mean for us college kids? Well, unfortunately all this shows is that Grandma and Grandpa will be commenting on your status and inviting you to kill zombies with them. Keep an eye out for Grandma’s “Bunco” facebook event. I wonder if ‘guests are allowed to bring friends to this event’?
For more on facebook and Grandparents, check out the full story below.
Are your grandparents on facebook? Let us know in the comments.
[tags]company, computers, demographics, facebook, grandparents, new media, Tech, technology[/tags]
2 Comments
This is more than a growing trend – this is reality.
Worth a look is this blog:
Baby Boomer Grandparents: Good Bye Nana & Papa, Hello Avatars http://bit.ly/brPufH
As the author points out, if grandparents want to be relevant in their grandkids lives, then they have to be on Facebook and other sites.
Yeah…my mom is on facebook, playing farmville as we speak I’m sure. *chat disabled*