One of the most interesting
topics on the digital business stratosphere recently has been the demise of the
so-called “key” demographic 18-35 leaving social media.
This blog written by John Lynch recently caught my attention on the digital marketing website
digitalmistry.com, and it is quite a fascinating read disclosing the
parameters in which display the results that there has indeed been a dip in
users on social media, albeit not a drastic change.
Social Bakers the
online social media statistician guru website released their Socially Devoted:
Q4 results and it had indeed shown that in January of last year, Facebook went
from 982 to 972 million in that January period alone. Now the real reason for this sudden decline boggles the mind, but it could be down to one of a million
different reasons, and I sincerely doubt it is because our generation of kids
(18-35) are all of a sudden “getting over it”.
Now the writer says that “there
is still a lit of steam left from Asia only on 4.99%. But taking a closer look
at this and you see that the three regional population powerhouses China, India
and Indonesia are stuttering”. Now for me, I am by no means surprised by the
lack of penetration for social media in Asia, especially from China, as the
country’s ruling authoritarian powers have banned Facebook amongst other social
media outlets from being accessible in the world’s most populous nation. The Great Firewall of China as the boffins like to call it.
As a matter of fact, there are
only 70 million Facebook users in China, compare that to China’s own version of
Facebook -Weibo, it boasts up to 264 million users, this in a market of 520
million users, the writer says. In India however, there has been somewhat of a
plateau in growth since the start of January, with those aged 25-35 years
seemingly leaving the social media projection. And Indonesia is showing almost a
3% drop with 14-18 years old.
If i could convert your
attention to the graph below for a second, you can see that Asia amounts the highest number
of Facebook users with over 274 million in total, swiftly flowed by Europe with
251 million and North America with 239 million, followed by South America,
Africa and Oceania rounding out the top 6. But if we look closely at the
penetration figures which show the percentage of users compared with overall
population, Asia has only 6.75%, meaning although that region of the world has
such high population figures, it has only a small drop in the ocean in terms of
the amount of people who accessing Facebook on a regular basis. No doubt due to
the fact Facebook is banned in the most populous nation in the world, China.
We can also see a decline in
traditional power markets such as the US and the UK both losing 2.29% and 4%
respectively over a three-month period. Key indicators have shown that it is
indeed the 18-35 demographic who are dropping out for whatever reason, but the
question to experts alike is this, Is this Facebook, or is it social media
generally? Nobody really knows.
I’d like to focus a little
bit on trends for a while, as we ask ourselves the question of whether or not
trends are up or down. Is it because we 18-35’s aren’t being felt engaged enough
or is there another phenomenon to describe this trend? We all know now that the
mobile device is apparently helping with increased engagement as defined by Mr
Zuckerberg who said “the company is both reaching more people and keeping them
more engaged on the service and making more money from each minute people spend
there”.
For me, this can only mean
one thing- supply and demand, and as the demand for Facebook drops so can the
price for advertising. Our good friends at Social Bakers had dropped the
average pay per click price from $1.13 to $0.75 back in the start of 2013, with
the decline in demographic the main indicator for this decision.
Once again, we have the seen
the power that consumers possess, and as consumers become slowly uninterested
in Facebook it could, according to the writer “mean that the audience remaining
is of lesser value as it stands to reason that less competition from
advertisers would drive the CPC and CPM down”. My question to you is, are these
figures really accurate? Or are we witnessing a power shift in the social media
realm?
References
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