It's Facebook's world, we just live in it
Posted in Youth Culture Research on January 15th, 2009
As you’ve surely heard, social networking’s reigning goliath, Facebook, grew larger and more goliath-like in 2008. It officially surpassed Myspace as the world’s most popular social networking tool in April 2008. Interestingly, much of it’s virus-like growth has taken place abroad. According to Google, Facebook was the single most popular search term in Belgium, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Switzerland — and it was among the top ten most popular searches within every other country Google tracks. Which is, you know, basically the whole world.
As the number of active Facebook users quickly approaches the size of a country of its own, the blogosphere has been overflowing with good demographic data that might be of interest to you all. Our ever-sage friends at iStrategyLabs have an excellent summary here. Forrester Research’s Jeremiah Owyang has a wider social networking survey here. Carolyn Phillips at Millenial Marketing has an analysis worth reading as well.
The quick-and-dirty analysis is simple: Facebook is growing in every conceivable direction. At nearly 60 million active users world wide, we’re all running out of big-sounding adjectives to describe it. With that said, the most rapid expansion is taking place not among Millenials — who are by and large already there — but the parents of Millenials. As more than a few people have noted, Facebook is getting older and grayer by the day.
Although there is much hand-wringing across the blogosphere about the likely reaction from the audience we all watch so carefully — those somewhere along the high school and college continuum — we at YMC are unequivocally confident that, at least for the next few years, Facebook will remain a force in the youth marketing world. (For those who needed a reminder, Burger King reminded us of Facebook’s power just the other day.) For the near future, no doubt, Facebook will continue to be an important arrow in YMC’s quiver — and for all others interested in holistic youth marketing. Of course it’s just as important to remember, however, that social networking is just one of many tools. A good campaign is a holistic one — a campaign that touches young people across a number of platforms, creating true peer-driven brand experiences as it goes. It’s our good fortunes as marketers to live in a world where this can be accomplished in so many different ways.
