The Graying of Facebook

Last week I was at a meeting at Facebook and as Facebook was talking about their demographics, one of the statistics that struck me was facebook’s demographics is starting to mirror those of the U.S. of A.

According to comScore, more than 50% of Facebook’s users in the U.S. are over 35; the single biggest age demographic in the U.S. on Facebook is now between 35 and 44, and that Facebook’s fastest growing demo is 55-plus.

With 52 million U.S. users and 170 million worldwide the graying of Facebook is to be expected simply because Facebook does not have a lot of growing room left among the younger set. According to Pew Internet and American Life data, 75% of online adults 18-24 already have a profile on a social network.

“For those to grow, they’d have to have aged,” said Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer. “It’s from growth and expansion to ubiquity.”

So what does it mean for marketers that social networking is getting older? Adage had a post on this recently and they pointed out that for Facebook, the upside is they’re now being considered for a wider array of marketing budgets.

“A year ago, they thought about it as a place to reach people in college or high school; now we’re talking about moms, or reaching families looking to go on vacation,” said Kevin Barenblat, CEO of ContextOptional, which has implemented Facebook campaigns for Guinness, Microsoft and the Los Angeles Times.

The worry for marketers is that the graying of Facebook will turn off the younger, college age members. That does not seem to be the case at the moment as Facebook is still the most popular website on campus above Google and Yahoo, according to an Anderson Analytics poll of college students last fall.

“Social networking is so engrained into the lifestyle of college students that it wouldn’t be any less cool because their parents and grandparents are there,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.