Facebook Thoughts and Uses for Adults

If you would have asked me a few years ago about Facebook, I would have told you that it was a social networking site exclusively for people in college. Two years ago, I had to join Facebook to learn how it worked from a business-marketing perspective. At the time, I had 8 friends and they were all people who were much younger than me. I think my 8 connections were the recent college grads that I worked with at MindBites.com.

During the summer of 2008, Facebook reached a critical mass and somehow made a bridge over to people in my age group. I was born in 1970. I went from 8 friends to maybe 75 friends in the course of one week. When a guy down the street who is older than us joined Facebook, my husband said “if that guy is on Facebook, then I absolutely have to be on Facebook.” He joined and within a week he had over 100 friends and now 7 months later, he has 270 friends.

Facebook provides statistics that they have over 150 million active users. More than half are out of college and the fastest growing group of users is over 25 years old; actually, the statistics are quite staggering and they can be viewed here http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics.

What does this mean? This means to me that Facebook meets a need that has not existed in the market before now. It allows people of all ages to connect with another and share their lives- either from a passive or active perspective. I will explain what this means to me.

I have reconnected with people from my past (elementary, jr. high, high school, college, sports, work ) and am connected to people who are currently an active part of my life. Each day when I log in to Facebook, I get caught up on what people are doing, thinking about, what their children look like, their vacation photos, where they work and live. I can choose to passively sit back and take it all in or I can jump into the fray and comment on other peoples photographs, their status, their thoughts and post photos of my own, join groups, answer questions, update my own status etc.

I truly feel like I know a little something about these people that I have not seen in years who I have often thought about. It literally answers the age old question “I wonder what ______ is up to after all these years”. To be honest, sometimes people pop up that I have not thought about at all but when I see their name, I instantly remember them and all the memories. Further, sometimes I wish people would be on Facebook who have not yet crossed the bridge and I have the comfort of knowing that they too will eventually join.

It also helps me stay connected to people who are currently in my life. Communication through Facebook has become an accepted form of communication and Facebook has made it extremely easy to reach out to your people. I also have found new connections with my cousins and family members. In the past, I typically only saw family at holidays or gatherings, and now I feel like I am part of their daily life, which is so amazing. For me, Facebook takes all the separation that exists in the world through geographic distance, life struggle and busy schedules, and shrinks the universe down into something that makes ongoing connection possible.

Although, I have used and explored Facebook from a personal perspective as well as a business perspective, I know that I have only scratched the surface of the many ways it can be used. My father who is 62 just joined and my mother is getting ready to create a Facebook group for the docents from the Blanton Museum of Art. Mindbites has a group in Facebook that we use as part of our marketing strategy and we have also paid for targeting advertising on Facebook.

To make a long story even longer, I do not think Facebook is going away any time soon. My suggestion would be to give it a try as it is has many uses beyond personal. It is not the same as Linked In just in case you were about to say that to yourself. Some people think that joining Facebook would take too much of their time or be too much maintenance and I believe that you can put as much or as little into it as you feel necessary.

Here are some links to helpful Facebook User Guides:

- http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-facebook/

- http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/archives/page9141.cfm

- http://www.sugarrae.com/the-updated-unofficial-and-smartass-guide-to-using-facebook

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