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Social Media

04 September 2017 08:45

I came about 5 years late to the social media scene getting involved very reluctantly when I volunteered for a national organisation that wanted to increase its reach to a younger audience.

As the graph shows, the peak usage is the 25 – 34 age range. Of that number, 59% access Facebook once a day or more. Interestingly, over the past few years, the over 65s show a 62% increase in users! Facebook is used almost equally by all socio-economic groups, almost equally by those living in urban or rural environments and almost equally across all income bands. We spend a whopping 21 hours browsing the net each week with over six of those solely using Facebook. It is a force to be reckoned with and it is a platform that simply cannot be ignored.

So, what’s not to like about it? Whilst you may disagree, for me it’s the seeming lack of accountability. Anyone is free to post anything whether it’s fact or fiction. What does follow from that is, with everyone spending so much time online, it quickly becomes a long thread of everyone joining in, sometimes with nothing meaningful to say.

I spent ten days on holiday recently and made a deliberate decision not to access my Facebook pages. I didn’t miss not knowing who was where, what they had for breakfast, who they met and so on. I can tell you – it was quite liberating. Why not give it a try?