Summertime seems to be ushering in a drop off in facebook traffic amongst the 18-25 set, although they still remain the dominant demographic. The last 30 days has seen a 3% drop in traffic among the college crowd, but it has also produced a bump of 1.5 million users among those over 35.According to some usage figures, active facebook users in the US now total 70 million, with 60% of them over 26.
When I speak in schools and to education trade groups, one of the biggest things I hear from parents is that they are afraid of what their kids are doing online. But a lot of this fear comes from a lack of knowledge. In other words, the parents themselves have not taken the time to jump on facebook or one of the other social networking services to see what all the fuss is about. Well, that might be changing. The popular parenting site Babycenter recently completed a pretty extensive study about the uptake among moms and they say that moms who use social media is up 462% since 2006. As always, these numbers should be kept in perspective since in 2006, the overall usage numbers of social media was nowhere near where it is today.
The more parents, teachers and administrators educate THEMSELVES about social networking, the better chance we will all have to help our kids become digitally savvy adults. Kids might get bummed out being “friended” by their parents or another adult relative. But it’s worth it if the end result is that we, as adults, learn the facts about living our lives online instead of responding to misinformation and negative hype.
6 Responses to “Moms, kids and social networking”
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Matthew Chamberlin is a social media marketer, experienced video producer, blogger and speaker at industry conferences, keynotes and corporate events.
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Is there any kind of consensus as to when it is appropriate for children to begin participating on social networks like Facebook? My 11 year old is a master at texting. No doubt he will want to dive into SN’s any day now.
While its hard to imagine very young kids on these sites, I’ve got to think that just as there are older users, there are probably younger ones as well.
They’re there, all right.
Technically, facebook’s Terms of Service prohibit anyone younger than 13. Not sure how you can verify that since the honor system is hardly foolproof. (Seemed like everyone on MySpace was born in 1901!)
I think the answer depends on the kid. I remember one mom I spoke to who also had an 11-year old who wanted to be on facebook. She let her do it, but when she realized that none of her other friends were there, she bailed pretty quickly.
Apart from the children more
and more parents are finding
that Facebook is interesting
and that it caters to a
basic human need in
socialization.
E mailing has evolved
into Facebook. I wonder
whether you could guess
what FB would evolve
into say within the
next couple of years ?
Kumari-
That is a great question and one that I think about a lot.
My take is that facebook, twitter, etc., will all either cease to exist or morph into other services in the next 5 years or so. That is why I think it’s not important to focus on the TOOLS so much as the cultural shift that is going on.
We live in a culture where sharing is now the imperative, led by those “digital natives” born after 1980. While the tools may come and go, the expectations we all now have to communicate instantly, find reviews on products, share pictures or family updates- that is not ever going back to the way it was.
What do you think?
How do you see off-line social networking integrating with on-line social nets? Is there a market for flesh and bones networks?
Hi Bret-
Thanks for the question. My feeling is that NOTHING can ever take the place of the face to face meeting. Social networking is great, but its true value, in my opinion, is to facilitate offline (otherwise known as real life) conversations.
I say this as I write to you from Doha, Qatar where I flew halfway across the world to meet face to face with a client. No e-mail, status update or tweet could ever accomplish what I got done simply by just being here.