Facebook is Becoming a News Website for Adults?
Following Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook will soon implement a “dislike” button for its users, several startling facts about the social media giant’s demographics have been unearthed to attempt to explain this drastic change. While Facebook was originally created for and is still thought of as a network for teenagers and college students, less than half of its user base still falls in that age range. Of course some of its users have simply grown up since its inception in 2004, but a significant percentage of adults must have joined the network when they were well over college age as Facebook increased in popularity. As a result of this trend, younger users have begun to dwindle and move to other forms of social media as their parents and other family members join their network. Suddenly the thought process for a teenager posting a picture changes from “I can’t wait to show all my friends this picture of me at the party!” to “Do I really want my parents to see me tagged in this picture?” This may be somewhat of a separate warning sign to Facebook as it is no longer viewed by younger demographics as a space for free expression.
Instead, for many adults Facebook has become their main source of news. This news can come in many forms, with extremely varied levels of personal connection from the older user. An older user may see news from their friends or even children about engagements, weddings, and deaths. Interspersed between these personal news stories will be business articles, political coverage, and local news stories that may not even be shared by the user’s friends but still appear in the news feed. As the Facebook demographic has shifted to older users, there has been a corresponding shift to Facebook prioritizing showing news to users. This helps to keep the new majority of users active as they should ideally always be seeing the type of content they are looking for. This has also led to the epidemic of “clickbait” articles that are more focused on enticing users to open the article than actually having a news story to report about. However, as the typical Facebook post has changed from teenagers posting pictures of having fun with their friends to news stories, a simple like button is no longer as effective. Users do not want to “like” a news story about a tragic death or a natural disaster but they still want to indicate that they have read the story and empathize or send their condolences. Facebook wants the new button to be used in these situations, but they have to carefully watch how it is used as they cannot directly control how their one billion node network will use this new function.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-dislike-button-result-of-aging-users-2015-9