A more urgent matter for Facebook is the demographic time bomb that is rearing on its head.
Facebook is confronted with an existential crisis: teenagers are leaving the social media platform.
The number of teenagers leaving Facebook for other social media platforms are in greater numbers than teenagers joining Facebook lately.
And the Cambridge Analytica breach is adding to the injury.
Since 2013, the teens saw Facebook as not cool and In 2015, they were leaving Facebook because they found it “meaningless”.
There is also the “Facebook-nevers,” who are becoming tweens and skipping Facebook entirely.
This is bad for Facebook because it will impact the platform’s business engines.
It will also mean a shift in the way businesses are using Facebook for the promotion of their news portals and other businesses.
For example, in 2018, 2.2 million 12- to 17-year-olds and 4.5 million 18- to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook in the UK.
This is 700,000 fewer than in 2017, as younger users defect to services such as Snapchat, according to eMarketer.
A surge in older users means over-55s will become the second-biggest demographic of Facebook users this year.
The report says that while Facebook has so far been successful in keeping hold of younger users shifting to services such as Instagram, which it bought in 2012 for $1bn, defectors are now increasingly heading to upstart Snapchat.
Facebook UK users 2018 v 2017
Age 12 to 17 2.2m, down 300,000
Age 18 to 24 4.5m, down 400,000
Age 25 to 34 7.2m, flat
Age 35 to 44 5.9m, flat
Age 45 to 54 5.6m, up 100,000 users
Age 55 to 64 3.5m, up 200,000 users
Age 65-plus 2.9m, up 300,000 users
In 2013, Rosabeth Moss Kanter Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard Business School said in the future, the biggest demographic change in the U.S. is the rise of the majority-minority.
In the Wall Street Journal she wrote that this is an odd concept that shows that we still haven’t gotten over the idea that white males are the norm and everyone else is a stranger.
“The millennials are very idealistic and have lost confidence in the political process. They want change, and they want it now. They want to save the world, which raises the bar for all businesses in focusing on sustainability and social responsibility.
“They expect to be pampered with goods and services, rely on constant digital communications and are committed to a better planet. Business must focus on sustainability, and digital technology to earn the trust of the rising new generation of consumers,” he said to The Journal.
And this is proving right.
There is a massive transformation in the way online businesses will be run and in which channel they will get generate more revenue.
It is now becoming obvious that Facebook will be positioned as a ‘elderly generation’ platform.
But it will not be a total loss for the company that also owns Instagram because this is where the tweens are heading, right now!