Home Social Networks: Boomers Feel Left Out

Social Networks: Boomers Feel Left Out

Even though baby boomers make up more than one quarter of all US Internet users, and even though the majority of this group spends over five hour per week online, a new survey by Burst Media found that only 14% of boomers feel that the content on the Internet is focused on people their age. An even smaller number of boomers (9.9%) thinks that Internet advertising is focused on their demographic. With regards to social networks, most boomers also think that these sites are not focused on people their age.

According to Burst Media, close to 80% of women and 76% of men under 34 belong to at least one social networking site. For baby boomers, these numbers drop to 50% and 44% respectively. Part of the problem here is that boomers don’t think that these social networks are focused on their age group. Only 11.9% of boomers who belong to a social networking site think that the site is geared to people their age.

As the Burst Media survey notes, boomers actively look for different things online than younger users. Young adults look for entertainment news (49%), games (41%), local and national news (37%), and social media sites (36%). Boomers, on the other hand, are far more interested in local and national news (55%), shopping info (41%), and health info (40%).

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Boomers make up 34% of Internet users in the US, and as a recent report from Forrester Research pointed out, this group is quite comfortable with creating and consuming social media. Social networks, however, still haven’t quite found the right angle to draw these users in.

Bonus: Would Your Life be Disrupted if You Couldn’t Get Online? 83% Say So

83% of respondents to this survey say that their daily routines would be disrupted if they couldn’t get online. 41% even say that their lives would be ‘significantly disrupted.’ Interestingly, slightly more women (43.9%) than men (39.3%) think that their lives would be significantly disrupted without access to the Internet.

These are pretty impressive numbers, though we have to keep the methodology of this survey in mind. All of the respondents were Internet users, and this was an online survey. If Burst Media had also surveyed offline users, these number would probably have been slightly different.

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