While I spend a great deal of my day online and tend to be an early adopter, I was so late to Facebook that it already boasted over 100 million members when I joined. The network has expanded to include some 850 million accounts that were active during the month of December, 2011. Interestingly, one’s age appears to be an indicator of the likely size of one’s Facebook friends network. Lee Raine, Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, provides the illustration below as a part of his keynote, “The new normal in the digital age,” which he presented at the NFAIS annual conference.
So What?
While the data above is something I would have agreed with, I did not expect the age based pattern to be quite so clear.
- How does your Facebook friends network compare to the mean size of your generational cohort?
- Does your expectation of engagement with your Facebook friends increase, decrease, or remain unchanged based on the size of their networks?
- Do you expect the current pattern (as age decreases network size increases) to continue for the next several years or for one or more generational cohorts to deviate from it? Why?