Recently, the amount of press on the explosive growth of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter has been overwhelming. What’s been really surprising? The demographic accounting for this massive growth: Baby Boomers are now dominating the social media scene, at least with respect to adoption rate. Facebook, once perceived as a college kid activity when it was restricted to college e-mail addresses, now has women over the age of 55 to thank for its most recent growth, according to Inside Facebook. In the past four months alone, this demographic has grown a staggering 175.3 percent. Additionally, the number of Facebook users over the age of 35 has nearly doubled in the past 60 days.
Similarly and to an even greater degree, Twitter has been the beneficiary from the surge in traffic from the middle-age demographic. Recent research from comScore discovered that 45 to 54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than the average Twitterer’s age to visit the site, which makes them the largest indexing age group. Overall, the average age of all 10 million twitterers is over the age of 35.
What does this mean for businesses? Social media, no longer a playground for the young, has reached a critical mass for use as an effective marketing tool. Coupled with the decline of print media, social media is now on the precipice of assuming its throne as king of reaching the masses. The onus is on businesses to come up with clever ways to effectively utilize these social media tools to bring customers back and reach new potential customers. And that’s where we come in. Let us create or refine your social media strategy and maximize these tools for you.
So many businesses post a happy hour, dinner, or other event on Facebook and expect a magic throng to materialize at their door. But without certain planning, precautions, and promotion on other channels (including in-person and word-of-mouth), your event is bound to bust. Never fear: heed these rules to optimize your Facebook invites.