Labor & Employment Law

Facebook: Almost 30% of All Users are Between 35 and 54

It's time to button up those technology, web and social networking policies! Contrary to popular thinking, only about 25% of Facebook users are under 35.  24- to 34-year-olds represent only about 25 percent of users. The reasons for this growth in the older population signing on is attributed to more job networking (or perhaps seeing what their children are doing on there). Since January, the number of new users between ages 35 to 54 grew 190 percent, to 20.2 million, according to a study by iStrategyLabs, an online marketing firm. New users 55 and older grew 590 percent, to 5.9 million.

These are the core of your employees.  And, why is it that there are still a fair number of people who have yet to embrace these policies?  I suspect that while the number of people who use social networking sites is exploding, there are still a fair number of luddites out there.  Some blogs have been around since the last decade (including this one for almost 5 years) and yet there are still people who have no idea what a blog is. 

I attended a major networking meeting featuring a renowned speaker a few weeks back who swore that Twitter was just a flash in the pan and would soon disappear. So perhaps this brilliant speaker is right.  Even if that were the case, there would be other sites and technological advances to replace it and those firms that don't adapt their policies will soon find themselves dealing with the perils that can come when trade secrets are lost or other damage occurs to the company through the errant use of these sites.

Full post as published by Strategic HR Lawyer on July 10, 2009 (boomark / email).