The other day I was scrolling through a private forum and I noticed one of the hot topics was this question, “Is Facebook for Old People Now?” and therefore “Is Facebook considered lame and uncool?”
I should clarify these were not the exact questions in the forum but is the general gist of what a lot of people are discussing right now whether they be internet marketers, social media managers, bloggers, journalists, etc. Facebook, once the darling of social media and web 2.0 companies, seems to be losing a lot of steam. Why is this?
I could throw you a bunch of statistics, link to a ton of articles, and give you a lot of different reasons for this. However, the simple and easy explanation is that Moms and Dads like it and use Facebook a lot nowadays. That means teenagers obviously don't like Facebook and can't be seen where parents hangout, online or offline. Therefore even young people that do have accounts, they really are not using Facebook for social networking.
Most of these young people have taken a liking to the 6-second video service, Vine. (WordPress a few months ago enabled Vine videos to be easily embedded in posts.) In addition they like Instagram, which is why Facebook spent 1 billion dollars to buy it, a photo sharing app allows you to easily create beautiful images and videos. SnapChat is another popular photo sharing service as it allows a person to send a photo which only the receiver can view for no more than 10 seconds. (That's why it has earned a reputation as a porn app.) Additionally Twitter is also gaining in popularity due to the ease of use of the social network on mobile devices.
Basically that all adds up to limited time for other social network chiefly Facebook. Young people consider Facebook a pain to use and too time consuming. Besides you can hear their thoughts before they would sign-on, “Ahh, this is something my parents like.” is what a pimple-faced, braces-laden teenager is saying somewhere right now.
Facebook still has not figured out how to make it easy to manage pages vs profiles and how to quickly sort through the newsfeed. I also don't really understand how people build audiences without spending money on ads. I am not going to spend money with a social network I have gained little value from personally and professionally. That's why I recently deleted my personal profile and that's the issue that Facebook executives are facing. If young people don't use it, they won't spend money with them in the future.
What do you think? Is Facebook for Old People now? Can Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook reverse this trend or is it the natural rise and fall of websites and the internet?
[Image Source – Washington Post]