Where Will The Cool Kids Be Hanging Out Next?

Friendster and MySpace is no longer a youth hang-out. Over 50% of the demographic for MySpace is now over 35 years old. No cool teenager wants to be hanging out in the same space as their mother, so most have moved onto cooler pastures.

Facebook now seems to be going through the same transition. I can measure it quite easily because I'm on the cusp (I'm 33 years old) and over the past 3-4 months the number of old high school contacts has been increasing steadily. This shows that people of my age group are invading what used to be the cool youth hang-out.

How will this impact those of us who are interested in marketing to the online audience? From my perspective, it depends on what demographic you're interested in. If you're interested in the youth market it means an increasing shift from site to site as a fickle audience moves from one trend site to another (as with any other youth oriented product). However, if you're interested in an older demographic, it means that social networking sites should be viewed as finally completely mainstream. Facebook, YouTube, MySpace are now longer fringe cool clubs but are the equivalent of the suburban mall. This presents a great opportunity to market to those adults now using these technologies to network.

A good example of this is LinkedIn. There are 6 million+ users in LinkedIn, and the demographic is largely urban professionals with a bias towards technology users. For a recruiter, this presents an opportunity. For $145US a posting, you can post your job posting to all 6 million users. In addition, those users that are connected to you via the LinkedIn network can get to you through your network connections and help further the conversation. We tried our first LinkedIn posting for a couple positions at the Foundation and were quite successful - I received about 15-20 resumes for 2 positions and they generally ranged from decent to excellent.