The reasons teenagers find Facebook lame also explain why older users find it essential:it’s become a digital hub for news,politics and interest groups. I’m on my city’s Planning Commission and when we switched to virtual meetings during the onset of the pandemic,one of the ways we did that was by broadcasting our sessions live on Facebook. Local elected officials and city government departments post news and updates.
My wife is a member of multiple local mom groups where she’ll buy and sell kids clothing and toys. It’s a place where communities post notices of events and other social gatherings. It’s generally just a big ball of stuff relevant to older people that would be hard for another company to unbundle.
Imagine TikTok trying to take some of this market share from Facebook - how would it work for a local government to post a message saying that they understand the frustration of residents about the lack of consistent trash collection but that they’re working to address the issue? Would local governments even consider TikTok the right platform for such a message?
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Being a whimsical platform for teens is that it makes you a less-appropriate platform for other kinds of users – it’s the flipside of Facebook’s struggle to recruit teens because it has a reputation as the site preferred by older people.
In the company’s earnings call this week,founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Facebook’s weakness with younger users and promised that executives would “make serving young adults their North Star rather than optimising for the larger number of older people.”
Those older users are so locked into the platform that the company probably can get away with giving them an experience that doesn’t suit them quite as well as the current model. But it remains to be seen whether Facebook can overcome all the challenges it has with teens and 20-somethings.