Social Media and Small Business Marketing to Older Adults

Everything we do in life is driven by the desire for happiness. As we get older, there is a tendency to rely on what has made us happy in the past, which of course prevents us from making new discoveries that may well work better.

This to me explains why older adults who were previously reluctant to give social media a try are now leading the pack. The Pew Internet project of the Pew Research Center recently released a report that shows the 50+ age group as nearly doubled their use of social media over the last year.

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This clearly indicates that older adults are indeed seeing the benefits of social networking. Understanding those benefits will help you to focus your social media marketing efforts accordingly.

Sustainable Family Relationships

Many of us in the 50+ category are still in the workforce.  I know I intend to be here for a long time, as I throughly enjoy my work with new media and small business marketing.  That's one community that I connect with – industry friends, clients, and influencers.

However, I believe most adults are using social media predominantly to stay connected with friends and their extended families.  This means that our communities will become increasingly intermixed as adults, their children, and grandchildren connect on Facebook.

So, it is conceivable to envision businesses having more relationships with multiple generations of the same family – which I imagine is how it used to be when more of us lived in small towns than in cities.   This has to be good news for small businesses that themselves involve multiple generations of the same family, and are better integrated into their communities as a result.

Targeted Marketing and Referrals

Marketers that have relied on traditional methods have to be salivating over the possibility of reaching their their ideal adult customers with the potentially laser accurate semantic search capabilities that are emerging on networking sites such as Facebook.

This creates some interesting possibilities, especially for companies whose products and services not only suit this demographic, but that too involve major investments – such as automobiles, home improvement, retirement services, health care, and more.  This is going to require a major shift in marketing for small businesses that in the past relied on nothing more than word of mouth.

The reason for this is Marketing and PR 101 – more impressions increases the likelihood of buying. When the economy was strong, I didn't have to do any marketing for my landscape contracting business.  World of mouth gave us all we could handle, especially during peak season. That's not the case for many industries moving forward.

The big opportunity that I missed when I owned that business was doing more work with family members of my best clients. While I can postulate a number of reasons for this, all of them are solved by being better connected on Facebook with my customers who are clearly connected with their extended families.  From there, the Facebook LIKE button will work its magic.

Meet Them Where They Are

The Pew study indicates that only a small percentage of older adults are using Twitter.  My experience supports that.  So, where are the aging baby boomers hanging out on the social networks? If they are still in the workforce, they are undoubtedly using LinkedIn.  However, my money says the majority are using Facebook – either for business or personal reasons, and most likely both.

Social media is more than community, it is entertainment too. Here at my house, you are more likely on any given evening to find me and my kids on Facebook than watching television.   I suspect the day will arrive when that will be true for all demographics.

What is happening here is a shift in what is socially acceptable.  Television used to be where families congregated during the evenings, and to a great extent that is still true. Nevertheless, there is another component to our day-to-day activities that is extracting us from these previous methods of entertainment, and that is social media.

We using new methods for driving our happiness, and social media is evidently gaining its share from every age group.

What is really exciting to me is that small businesses like mine and yours can take full advantage of it, unlike television which only helped major brands.

Marketing tells us to meet our customers where they are.

Facebook is sure shaping up as a good place to look, don't you think?.

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Have a great week!   Jeff