I recently published my thoughts on How do Generation X, Generation Y and Baby Boomers differ? What I didn’t mention in my post is that both my father-in-law and my mother-in-law recently joined Facebook and have been quite active on it. I expected my mother-in-law to join sooner or later, but I never expected that my father-in-law would get addicted to Facebook. So much so that he actually organized his high school reunion recently using Facebook.
Part of the reason for my in-laws to join Facebook was that my wife was using Facebook to post all the photos of our now four months old daughter.
My mother-in-law is actually on Twitter as well. Both me and my wife had to convince her to join but all that effort paid off because now we can easily stay in touch with her. Both me and my wife have activated device updates for her tweets, so whenever she tweets, we instantly get a text message on our cell phones. Of course, she’s protected her updates on Twitter so only people she explicitly allow can follow her tweets.
Since she lives hundreds of miles away, this allows her to share things that she wouldn’t bother writing an email about. Although email started out as an informal medium of communication, in my opinion it has become too formal of a medium for communication.
Who has the time to craft an email when you can use Twitter to send your updates within 140 characters?
In fact, more adults are joining the social networking phenomenon every day. So much so that USA Today is featuring an article on how Baby Boomers are getting busy on social networks. The article talks about Kirk Douglas, who is 92 years old and “faithfully updates his page once a week.”
Recently, my wife pointed out that one of our local politicians has started following her on Twitter. She told me that this politician also has an active Facebook group. President Obama and the recent Presidential Elections can be credited for giving a huge boost to Twitter’s popularity. For politicians, not having a presence on social networks might make a difference between winning and losing an office.
One thing to remember is that not all social networks will benefit from Baby Boomers’ adoption of social media. For instance, I cannot imagine my in-laws regularly using MySpace, Friendster or Hi5. It’s the power of their social graph on Facebook that got them hooked.
Tags: Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, social media, social networking, twitter
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