Forty-somethings flock to Facebook

In a Busi­ness Week arti­cle ear­lier this week, Aaron Ricadela exam­ined Facebook’s grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity with adults.

Social net­work­ing is a busi­ness tool

Face­book was started at Har­vard, and remains pop­u­lar with uni­ver­sity stu­dents. I’ve had a Face­book account for almost 2 years, and I’ve recently seen more of my col­leagues join that site.

As I’ve pointed out here on June 30 and on my old blog on Sep­tem­ber 11, some employ­ers have used Face­book, MySpace and other social net­work­ing ser­vices to inves­ti­gate appli­cants. MySpace is an annoy­ing clut­ter of images, spam and media files, and I rarely check my MySpace account these days. Face­book is qui­eter, and it seems safer, although that site has become a pop­u­lar tar­get for mal­ware dis­tri­b­u­tion, accord­ing to yesterday’s brief arti­cle in Cam­pus Tech­nol­ogy.

Entre­pre­neurs and exec­u­tives have found that Face­book is a great way to do their own social net­work­ing. I think that Face­book is more fun to use than LinkedIn, a pop­u­lar social net­work­ing site that is geared towards work­ing pro­fes­sion­als. My col­leagues seem to pre­fer LinkedIn to Facebook.

LinkedIn is hang­ing on to its audi­ence – for now. Facebook’s mobile site is much eas­ier to use than LinkedIn’s cur­rent offer­ing, and that may be one rea­son that Face­book is gain­ing older users. My July 2nd arti­cle dis­cussed how exec­u­tives are being tar­geted through search engines and social net­work­ing sites such as LinkedIn.

Tagged as: facebook, linkedin, myspace, network, privacy, security, social, USA