Facebook is getting old: very old

We now know that TikTok is mainly used by young people, but what about Facebook? Who is 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 good in the fossil record when we look at the average lifespan of a user.

Facebook

According to many people, Facebook is no longer fun, but that doesn’t mean we’re all collectively turning away from it. Anyway, not many people delete their profile: they just leave it there. Not only to keep friends and posts from the past, but also to keep using Facebook when you log into other websites and track events, for example, or use groups (eg local giveaway groups, or fan clubs).

Facebook has somewhat faded into the background in recent years, in part because you hear the name a lot now that the parent company is no longer called Facebook, but Meta. But the platform also seems to come with slightly less exciting innovations. These are usually for Instagram (and to be fair, Instagram has mostly come from the competition lately). The enthusiasm around social media has shifted dramatically in recent years to TikTok and video, and Facebook is less apt for that.

3 billion users

However, make no mistake, because the social medium still has a large number of users. Facebook has 3 billion accounts, and in a world of 8 billion people, that’s a strange number. Of course there are duplicate accounts and there won’t be 3 billion different people, but Facebook’s influence is still huge. But under whom exactly? While young people seem to have left the Snapchat and TikTok platform, in addition to Instagram, Facebook mainly has older generations out of the two billion users who log in daily.

This is not a fact: as in: Facebook has never confirmed this, as it does not make any statements about the demographics of the platform, but it is noticeable that it is somewhat aging. Many social media experts endorse this as well. Young people are shaping the new world of communication, and fundamentally doing so on new platforms. Insider experts estimate that 28 percent of Facebook users in the US are between the ages of 18 and 34, compared to 46 percent on TikTok (and 42 percent on Instagram). If you look at the 12- to 17-year-old group, you will find that they are more different between night and day.

aging

So yes, Facebook is getting old, but it’s hard to prove with numbers as long as Facebook doesn’t open its mouth. Plus, after all, are people already on Facebook to Facebook, especially to log into another site? Two billion people online every day sounds great, but we think that why – and thus age – provides an even more interesting piece of data. In any case, it is clear that young people are on other platforms and Facebook is still lagging behind, leaving the “old people”.

Meta could ‘win back’ a lot of young people by coming up with a cool new innovation, but it’s likely to really happen outside of Facebook, like Horizon Worlds for example, if it’s of the quality that Mark Zuckerberg promised us in a few years for Metaverse. We’ve yet to see it all, but as we get older we still visit Facebook regularly to take a pulse, hoping the app will keep up with the times.