A couple weeks ago I received a call from Constant Contact. I use their newsletter distribution service. It makes things much easier. They had a question for me: "would I participate in an upcoming Webinar panel on using Constant Contact and social media?". It took me a nano-second to say "you bet". It's visibility and I can't imagine I wouldn't learn plenty. I've never listened or participated in a "webinar", but in a prior life I've done plenty of business videoconferencing. It can't be much different.
Anyway, the knowledge that I will be doing the webinar and having an interest in appearing knowledgeable to the couple thousand people I have been advised will be listening to it has inspired me to look at a few things. One is Facebook statistics. What I like about Facebook is you can easily target people on a number of different dimensions: age, geography, gender, interests, etc etc. The interest category is what I tend to focus on. Facebook can easily identify people with an interest in cycling since they naturally become fans of the many cycling related pages.
What has caught my attention is the demographic and growth pattern for Facebook. As of Jan 4, 2009, about 80% of Facebook users are under the age of 35. That's not especially great for me since most people who have the schedule flexibility and an interest in an overseas cycling tour are over the age of 35. Evidence of that is that the vast majority of folks following the Far and Away Facebook Fan page are in the 35 to 55 age range. However, the real eye-opener for me was that the growth rate in that age group is HUGE...an annual rate of 600%. It's a category that is doubling every 2 months! No other category even comes close. The parent, adult, working crowd is very quickly following the college age crowd to Facebook.
The upshot, of course, is that any business that doesn't have a presence in social media is missing a big opportunity. Plenty of companies, big and small, have a Fan page etc etc. But what really surprised me is a recent study of some 4 million websites which showed that only 5% of websites link their site to a Facebook or Twitter presence. I could find no statistics on how many sites have taken the relatively easy step of making their content more "viewable" on the tiny screens of increasingly popular mobile devices, but I would guess it's even less.
Maybe the apparent slowness to link all the web stuff together is a function of the folks maintaining websites being in the small (but growing!) 35 to 55 age category? My only comment is "get with it!" Which, of course, is no doubt the whole point of the Constant Contact Webinar........
