Generational Preferences for Social Media

In all of our Social Media research looking at age groups and the tools they use is vital to later helping clients and agencies develop an effective strategy for their Social Media engagement.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, but there are generational differences in the types of Social Media tools preferred, namely the level of creativity or functionality a service offers. Here we provide a basic snap of these preferences which can aid in designing Social Media campaigns/projects or tools.

Generation Tech or Gen Z: Only just edging into their teens at the start end of the curve, this group is all about being “interconnected” and “networked” and use the tools to gather into formal and informal groups for short and long periods. Highly creative with the tools they are the least fearful to adopt new social technologies, they are also very fickle and not loyal if a service doesn’t meet their demands.

Millenials: They’re happy to go wild with features, functionality and ability to express. This is the crowd that likes MySpace with the ability to create all kinds of backgrounds and move things around on their MySpace page. Having grown up with these tools, there is no fear. This is a highly “networked” group and prefer to function as “many” instead of singularly. Don’t waste your time trying to find these folks in Twitter though. They prefer tools where they can clearly identify who it is they are connecting with.

Generation X: Somewhat creative and flexible, but less so than Millenials (Gen Y) they prefer systems already in place. They’ll step outside the box a little, but not much. They prefer to be guided easily and have little time to waste on fancying up pages. They get to the point. Generation X is a little less “network” oriented than Millenials.

Boomers: Set the framework. Good UI is critical for this generation. They’re not as comfortable as any previous generation with Social Media. They use an average of no more than 3 Social Media tools, those usually being one Social Network (i.e. Facebook) on photo sharing (i.e Flickr) and email. It’s not about funky features, bells and whistles with this group. They’re more fearful of changes, like their privacy and are less “network” oriented online.

Silent Generation or Pre-Boomer: Extremely limited use of Social Media tools with email being the preferred tool, although we see some uptake with Skype and certainly Facebook. This group, when they use the tools, use them mostly for family and close friend communications.

Methodology:

These insights are the results of aggregating our research findings from over 180 research projects for the business, NGO and government sectors since 2008 where age has been a factor in strategy development. This aggregate data represents the summation of looking at over 100,000 people across these generations in the United States, Canada and UK.

For a more comprehensive report and breakdown of tool preferences by country and region we do offer reports to clients for purchase. Naturally. This is our business after all.

(Author, G. Crouch, CEO)