Embrace that Facebook is now the domain of mom and dad
I joined Facebook eight years ago, in the autumn of 2006, during my first semester of university. Like many Facebook users at the time, my first profile picture was taken in my dormitory.
Much has changed since then. It has been years since Facebook opened the flood gates to non-students and invited brands, publishers and celebrities into the mix. Nearly everyone is on Facebook now, and any association between college life and Facebook now alludes to a bygone era for the social network.
Young people are leaving Facebook en mass, especially the teen cohort who, during the social network’s rise, saw the Facebook account their university-issued email address allowed for as a kind of gift-with-purchase that came along with tuition.
According to the Global Web Index’s January 2014 report, Facebook lost 29% of its U.S. teen users in 2013, a trend that was reflected globally. Meanwhile, an iStrategyLabs report shows users over 55 have increased by 80% on Facebook in the past three years. Scores of other studies on Facebook have shown similar trends in recent months.
What was once a cesspool of frat party photos is now the domain of mom and dad and, increasingly, grandma and grandpa. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, either for Facebook or its advertisers. While some have suggested Facebook is headed for collapse or set to lose most of its user base, a decline in teen users alone doesn’t signal that either of those scenarios will come to be.
In fact, the shift in Facebook demographics could be great for marketers, especially those targeting baby boomers. As Media Post posits, if Facebook and marketers are smart, they’ll embrace the change and take the opportunity to sell to an affluent group that spends more – and purchases higher ticket items – than their kids. Given the demo’s long-standing love for TV, the migration onto Facebook could also carve out chances to interact with older consumers at multiple touch points.
And for the Axe body sprays, Doritos chips and Mountain Dews of the world, there’s always Snapchat, WeChat and We Heart It. We hear the kids still like them.
Beauty brands go real-time for awards season
With awards season in full swing, Marketing decided to take a look at how beauty brands are getting in on the red carpet action. From Cover Girl’s partnership with Twitter Canada and Shaw to L’Oreal’s newsroom approach to creating branded content in the moment, we recap how brands are taking advantage of all the social conversation about fashion and beauty during awards shows. Click through for the full story.
The mistake of MLK Day posts
For the first Social Scanner of the year, I vowed not to hop on the band wagon and shame brands for the less-than-PC gaffes they make on social media. Martin Luther King Day was the hardest so far to get through without piling anything on to the shaming pile. A tip for 99% of brands: Martin Luther King Day isn’t about you. It’s just not.
Here are a few of the offenders, via Digiday.
Hootsuite acquires analytics company
Hootsuite announced Wednesday that it has acquired the analytics company Ubervu, which lists the likes of NBC and Fujitsu as clients. The company is offering Ubervu’s services as a standalone product effective immediately and will begin to integrate the technology into Hootsuite’s own offering in the coming months. Full details here, via Hootsuite’s blog.
The Numbers
Simply Measured took a deep dive into how the top brands use Twitter. Here’s a look at the findings.
58%
Brands that have more than 100,00 followers on Twitter
78%
Brands that post less than 4 tweets per day
92%
Top brands that tweet at least once daily
43,100
Average engagements on Twitter per month for top brands
36%
Brand tweets that contain links
150%
More engagement that tweets that include photos and links receive versus pure text posts
98%
Top brands, as defined by Interbrand, currently on Twitter
