Friends Reunited relaunched today, to a fair bit of derision from the trendy young people that lead opinion on matters related to social media. “We don’t need Friends Reunited,” they scoff, “why – we have Facebook and Tumblr and Pinterest to occupy those idle moments when we’re supposed to be working. It’s a dead old horse.”
But trendy opinion formers aren’t everyone. These commentators also have parents and grandparents, who have possibly unintentionally embarrassed them on Facebook already.
My mum and dad are just getting to grips with Facebook. And though they use it, I know they feel that it’s not for them but because they want to join in and share, there is just no alternative. They signed up primarily to post photos of their grandchildren and I suspect, to stalk me a little now I live several hundred miles from them.
They use Facebook in a very basic way – to keep in touch with family and friends, reminisce and share the odd photo. They don’t post status updates, play games or ‘like’ brands. They would, I suspect, enjoy Friends Reunited’s new function that allows you to look up and collect old newspaper articles (something my computer-mad Granddad would have loved).
This isn’t to say everyone over 50 uses social media in this way or that they don’t love Facebook or shouldn’t be there (for the purposes of this blog, I’m considering people over 50), but stats suggest that there’s a huge untapped population of over 50s that are not on Facebook or don’t enjoy interacting there. Fanalyser shows that just eight per cent of Facebook's users are in this age group, and these graphs, though older and from the US, show that interaction on Facebook also correspondingly drop with age.
As far as content curation goes, these age groups sure as hell aren’t on Pinterest or Tumblr. These stats back this up – just 5.6 per cent of Tumblr users are aged over 55, with just eight per cent of Pinterest users in the same age bracket.
This lovely table from Wolfram Alpha shows the demographic breakdown of the UK – a rough guess has 22 million people, or just over a third of the UK populated aged over 50. And yet they make up less than 10 per cent of Facebook users, and a much lower percentage of the userbase of other ‘shared and curated media’ sites. In short, there’s a big hole in social media where a third of the population should be. Currently many are on Facebook, but not interacting there or using it to its full potential for whatever reason.
As far as content curation goes, these age groups sure as hell aren’t on Pinterest or Tumblr. These stats back this up – just 5.6 per cent of Tumblr users are aged over 55, with just eight per cent of Pinterest users in the same age bracket.
This lovely table from Wolfram Alpha shows the demographic breakdown of the UK – a rough guess has 22 million people, or just over a third of the UK populated aged over 50. And yet they make up less than 10 per cent of Facebook users, and a much lower percentage of the userbase of other ‘shared and curated media’ sites. In short, there’s a big hole in social media where a third of the population should be. Currently many are on Facebook, but not interacting there or using it to its full potential for whatever reason.
I can't say whether or not Friends Reunited will be the place to crack this issue and reach this group - whether it will have the pull and the credibility. But someone should - the gap in the market is in fact a gaping cavern.
So Friends Reunited. You wouldn’t be my first port of call for a social network, but you might perfect for my parents. And who knows – this could even solve the problem of those embarrassing comments on the latest batch of tagged photos.
So Friends Reunited. You wouldn’t be my first port of call for a social network, but you might perfect for my parents. And who knows – this could even solve the problem of those embarrassing comments on the latest batch of tagged photos.
most interesting,, i have noticed that facebook can be a " gateway site " for many new users, maybe FRU will do ok now people are used to the interwebs.
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