Facebook has grown exponentially particularly among 35-54 y/olds, who continued to be the fastest growing demographic at an even more accelerated rate of 276% in the last 6 months. You can examine the 2009 statistics thanks to iStrategyLabs
I believe this growth pattern can be understood by what I call the gentrification of Facebook. Here’s my hypothesis:
Facebook began as a network exclusive to college kids, who had to reach a critical mass of 1,000 per school to enter the network. As Facebook opened up to the public, it then opened up its platform to third-party developers to build a variety of applications. “Cool” innovators flooded through the gates, quickly giving rise to what could be considered an online gold rush.
Venture-backed companies, agency and marketing folks, and developers built a seemingly limitless number of applications that were quickly added and shared, and “social media” entered the marketing vernacular as the new umbrella term for these types of innovative technologies. This accelerated adoption beyond the college kids and eventually snowballed to make the 35+ demographic the fastest growing on Facebook.
The ironic thing is that nobody uses applications anymore, perhaps because the concept was canibalized by so many bad applications. Few are very useful or relevant, and they are on the way to becoming a novelty item used only by marketers who are six months behind the curve, particularly with the newly revamped fan pages. As this happened Facebook also put in place minimum advertising buys at $100k/month, the rich folks had indeed started to take over the neighborhood.
The pattern I see within Facebook strikes me to be similar to the gentrification process I’ve witnessed in my neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The trendsetters of innovative artists were replaced by trend followers of rich NYU kids, and ultimately prices in rent rose, new restaurants opened, and the wealthy people opened profitable businesses and developed condominiums.
I think gentrification is really a name to describe the canibalization and consumption of cool, and it can be traced through discrete sites created to facilitate exchanges. In my neighborhood this would be between the new businesses and the “hipster” – a pejorative trope for the jaded kid that was too cool to do anything productive – whereas within Facebook it would be the profile holder and the application developer.
In the wake of the application gold rush status updates became the most significant feature for many users, fueling a frenzy of friend adding to establish a social network defined by short conversations, comments, link sharing – the types of menial distractions professionals love during a work day. It will be interesting to see how Facebook continues to evolve in the future, but what I really want to know is, what are all the cool kids up to now that applications are no longer cool?
Pic below a piece of social commentary on gentrification from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, taken last weekend on my iPhone.
Things sure have come a long way since the news rooms of the old days! Over 500 publications went out of business last year, and an additional 100 in 2009.
