The biggest group on Facebook are not university or college students, or even people in their 20s in their first job. According to analysis by iStrategyLabs, the biggest group of users on Facebook are 35-54 year olds.
Their study of figures for the US that are publicly available to advertisers shows that over 28% of Facebook users are in this age-range, with a further 12% of users aged 55 or over. In fact the 55+ age-group is the one that has seen the largest growth in the six month to July 2009 – an impressive 514% increase in users.
Image via Wikipedia
So Facebook users are starting to get older. The social network that started with 18 year old students at college and university has now grown up – its users are now more reflective of the population and indeed are much older than a few years ago.
This development shows that Facebook is starting to reflect the overall Internet population and is, indeed, putting the end to such misconceptions as that social media and social networks in particular are for “young people”. This just isn’t true. At FreshNetworks, we run online communities for diverse groups – from women with an average age of 40+, to younger communities of people in their 20s. If there is a bias in terms of who is online and participating in social media, it certainly isn’t age.
Original Post: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2009/07/older-users-becoming-dominant-on-facebook/
