Grandma Wants to Friend You

Everyone has experienced it – the day that what was cool became decidedly not. I remember the day that my mom walked down the basement stairs into the superfund site that was my room and declared that she “really liked that new Pink Floyd guy’s music”. Needless to say, “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall” were not going to be played much until I moved out of the house. While it is possible that my mother was strategically out-maneuvering me, i.e., pretending to like something in order to guarantee that she would never have to hear it again, she was a trained musician and could recognize interesting new trends. After all, she listened to Miles Davis and Ravi Shankar as well as Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.

This brings us to the current conundrum of today’s Gen Y and Gen Z Facebook users. In the brief few years of its existence,  Facebook has grown from being the exclusive province of college-age online users to the world-wide social network phenomenon of today. If the site’s self-reported numbers are to be believed, well over 300 million people use the tool and something close to half of them log into the site in any given month. The fastest growth over the past year has been among adults over age 35 with the biggest proportional increase among those over 55. This means that the nightmare scenario of having your grandmother or your mother-in-law (I know this to be true) friend you has come true. My own daughter is still perturbed that her parents want to use Facebook – no doubt to stalk her every movement…

Now comes some interesting data that indicates that younger users may be beginning to abandon Facebook. Mediaweek reports that some advertisers are evaluating how this may require changes in their social media advertising plans. According to comScore, the average number of minutes spent online at the site by people 18-24 fell for the third consecutive month in September compared to the same period a year ago. In July, Facebook usage fell 3 percent, in August 13 percent and September 16 percent. Could be that the drop reflects mobile device users that are not counted, could be that as the fall arrived younger users began to focus more on school (Ha!) or it may reflect the eternal struggle of the young to keep their elders at arm’s length.

When you start getting friended by your grandmother, I think that’s when it starts to lose its cool – Huw Griffiths, EVP, Interpublic Group’s Universal McCann.