In a Business Week article earlier this week, Aaron Ricadela examined Facebook’s growing popularity with adults.
Social networking is a business tool
Facebook was started at Harvard, and remains popular with university students. I’ve had a Facebook account for almost 2 years, and I’ve recently seen more of my colleagues join that site.
As I’ve pointed out here on June 30 and on my old blog on September 11, some employers have used Facebook, MySpace and other social networking services to investigate applicants. MySpace is an annoying clutter of images, spam and media files, and I rarely check my MySpace account these days. Facebook is quieter, and it seems safer, although that site has become a popular target for malware distribution, according to yesterday’s brief article in Campus Technology.
Entrepreneurs and executives have found that Facebook is a great way to do their own social networking. I think that Facebook is more fun to use than LinkedIn, a popular social networking site that is geared towards working professionals. My colleagues seem to prefer LinkedIn to Facebook.
LinkedIn is hanging on to its audience – for now. Facebook’s mobile site is much easier to use than LinkedIn’s current offering, and that may be one reason that Facebook is gaining older users. My July 2nd article discussed how executives are being targeted through search engines and social networking sites such as LinkedIn.