Why Gen X Loves Facebook (Hint: It’s not because their kids are there)

Inside Facebook has a new set of stats (culled from Facebook’s ad system) that detail the enormous growth in Facebook’s over-25 membership. As of March 2009, 41% of US members were between the ages of 26 and 44, compared with 35% between age 18-25. The fastest growing demographic is women over 55, Inside Facebook says.

In fact, women outnumber men as Facebook members in every age group. For example, of the 9.7 million US members between the ages of 35 and 44, 56% are female. In the 45-54 group, 60% of members are female.

For a while now the going theory was that older generations were signing on to Facebook to keep track of their kids. But Facebook has a wide appeal beyond parents of teens and college students. I’ve been a member for some time now for professional reasons, but over the past few months I have seen dozens of college friends, high school friends and people in my town sign on. Very few of them have kids who are older than pre-teens.

It’s true that some of the appeal of Facebook is to reminisce about the good old days, or simply the voyeuristic tendency we all have to see what our old classmates and friends look like now. No more waiting for the class reunion to discover that your high school homecoming king gained 40 pounds and lost all his hair. His picture is right there for you to see. (And just a few clicks away are the requisite pictures from 20 years ago, showing him with all his hair, posted by some other high school friend.)

Some of that usage will fall away; connecting with friends from 20 years ago is often no more than a “hey what are you up to these days” kind of conversation. But even if I don’t interact on a regular basis with old friends, it’s still fun to browse their profiles and read their news feed items every so often. One friend bragged about her son’s success at a regional swim meet. Another posted that her employer is making her take two weeks off this spring, unpaid. Yet another had the utter embarrassment of being asked if she was pregnant (she’s not).

Before Facebook, none of this would have ever crossed my radar. You may argue “Who cares?” but the reality is, a lot of people care. And they are people from Generation X and above who are quickly realizing how fun it is to get updates on the lives of friends they haven’t thought about in years.

Good news: Social Media Spending Up. Bad News: (Read on)

Forrester Research finds in a December 2008 survey that 53% of marketers who are already using social media marketing will increase their spending on social media marketing in the next six months. Only 5% expect to decrease their budget. Good news, right?

Sort of. As report author Jeremiah Owyang points out in his blog, “this doesn’t mean that budgets are expanding immensely, since this is a ‘new’ media, these are small budgets. How small? I say minuscule. Three-quarters of marketers have $100,000 of less budgeted for social media marketing.”

Do the math: Forrester surveyed 145 marketers, 114 of whom were already using social media marketing (that’s an impressive 78% of marketers surveyed, by the way). But of those 114, 75%, or 85.5 marketers, are spending at most $100,000–or less than the price of a single prime-time 30-second spot in Q4 2008, according to data from Targetcast cited in The New York Times. Going price for that 30 seconds? $122,000.

Of course, 25% of Forrester’s respondents are spending more than $100,000 on social media marketing. But who knows how much more? $101,000? $500,000? $1 million?

Last week I spoke at the Seattle Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference. I sat in on the social media marketing session, which was so full that extra chairs had to be brought in. But one comment from a panelist stuck with me. He advised attendees to go out and prove their case for social media marketing by doing as much as they can for free. Then once they get results, he said they should go to their bosses and ask for budget to do more.

I wonder: How many bosses will look at what was accomplished for free and say “That’s good enough for me; why spend money?”

Addendum (3.18.09): ReadWriteWeb has additional details from the Forrester report. According to one chart, 49% of marketers surveyed had budgeted $30,000 or less for soft costs such as services, strategy and support, and 40% had budgeted the same range for actual social media tools. The survey group for this data consisted of 83 respondents who worked for companies with 250+ employees, and knew the details of their social media budgets.

Facebook’s Stream of Consciousness

Today Facebook unveiled new changes to profile pages and also to the Pages (yes with a capital P) that marketers and public figures can maintain.

The changes are complex but essentially boil down into allowing people to have more control over what information they see from their Facebook friends, and to make it easier for people to post whatever they want to and spread the word to both friends and fans. For marketers, the changes mean closer integration into the News Feed that people see when they use Facebook.

One of the biggest changes is to the status update box, which will simply say “What’s on your mind?” instead of “What are you doing right now?” It’s a nod to the fact that people no longer use the box to say what they’re doing, but what they are feeling, thinking, reading, watching, interacting with.

The net net of all of this is that Facebook wants to capture and disseminate the ongoing bits of information that people, companies and public figures say, and the actions that they take. Said Mark Zuckerberg in a note on the Facebook blog: “People will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself.”

It’s a bold, philosophical statement, but it also says a lot about where Facebook thinks it should participate in the stream of discussions and activities of the social Web. And that position it aspires to is right smack in the center.

What does all this mean for social network marketing? I’m honestly unclear at this point. In one sense, the changes Facebook is making to Pages will effectively put a more personal face on a brand. As Zuckerberg describes in his blog, “You can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe.” All this information will be pushed to your News Feed, if you are a fan of the brand or person.

This gets into obvious Twitter territory, a place where Facebook very plainly wants to be. Much to pay attention to here.