2023-05-15 18:00:00
We now know that young people mainly use TikTok, but what about Facebook? Who’s still there? Facebook is a dinosaur when it comes to how long the social media platform has been around (nearly twenty years). But it also turns out to be pretty well in the fossil record when we look at the average age of a user.
According to many people, Facebook is no longer fun, but that does not mean that we are all going away from it en masse. In any case, many people don’t cancel their profile: they just let it exist. Not only to keep the friends and posts from the past, but also to continue using Facebook when logging in to other websites and keeping track of events, for example, or using the groups (for example, neighborhood giveaway groups, or fan clubs ).
Facebook has faded somewhat into the background in recent years, which is partly because you hear the name less often now that the parent company is no longer called Facebook, but Meta. But the platform also seems to come up with slightly less exciting innovations. Those are usually for Instagram (and, to be fair, Instagram’s have mostly come from the competition lately). Enthusiasm about social media has shifted considerably in recent years to TikTok and video, and Facebook is less suitable for that.
3 billion users
Make no mistake, however, because the social medium still has a huge number of users. Facebook has 3 billion accounts, and in a world of 8 billion people, that’s a bizarre number. Of course there are duplicate accounts and it will not be 3 billion different people, but Facebook’s influence is still great. But, under whom exactly? While young people seem to have left the platform for Snapchat and TikTok, in addition to Instagram, Facebook mainly has older generations among its two billion users who log in daily.
That is not a fact: as in: Facebook has never confirmed that, because it does not make any statements about the demographics of the platform, but it is noticeable that it is aging somewhat. Many social media experts also endorse this. Young people are shaping the new world of communication, and they do so mainly on new platforms. Insider’s experts estimate that 28 percent of Facebook users in the US are 18-34 years old, compared to 46 percent on TikTok (and 42 percent on Instagram). If you look at the group of 12 to 17, it’s even more of a night and day difference.
Aging
So yes, Facebook is aging, but it is difficult to prove it in numbers as long as Facebook does not open its mouth. Plus, after all, are people really on Facebook to Facebook, especially to log in to another site? 2 billion people online every day sounds great, but we think the reason behind it – and therefore age – provides an even more interesting piece of data. In any case, it is clear that young people are on other platforms and that Facebook still lags behind, leaving the ‘older people’.
Meta can ‘recoup’ many young people by coming up with a great new innovation, but it will probably really take place outside of Facebook, like Horizon Worlds for example, if it is of the quality that Mark Zuckerberg promised us in a few years for the metaverse. We still have to see it all, but while we are getting older ourselves, we still regularly visit Facebook to take a pulse, in the hope that the app will keep up with the times.
Laura Jenny
When she’s not tapping, she’s traveling around the wonderful world of entertainment or some cool place in the real world. Mario is the man of her life,…