Teaching Facebook to the Older Generation

Upon returning from a conference for her profession, my Mom asked me if I could help her create a facebook account to advertise for her business. She offered to pay me by the hour to spruce up her page and create a fan page for her business. I had noticed before my mom came to me with her request, that many business have been appearing on FB pages. I remember when I first got a FB. My mom was so concerned about me releasing particular personal information. She was worried for my safety just like many parents were during the advent of violence resulting from improper use of Myspace. So, originally FB was for college students only, which helped to keep information more private. Now it's expanded entirely to include countless advertisers. However bizarre the transformation may seem, it makes sense that it has grown to this point. Being a friend of someone or a fan of something on FB seems to increase the likelihood that you will at least remember their existence.

So, I created my Mom's profile and a page for her business. I added a few dozen friends, but was going to have to actually sit down with her to talk about who else to add. Going through this simple process with her made me realize some things about our FB "friends". The most recurring point would be that we DON'T really care to know about the majority of them nor do we care to have them following us. We started by going through her best friend’s Friends List. She would recognize some names, and when I was about to click “Add Friend” she would repeatedly say “I don’t care about so-and-so”. I argued with her a little, and after a few sessions she is starting to see the point of the Friends List. I tried to explain to my mom that you don’t have to actually be ‘friends’ in the strictest sense of the word in real life. There are such things now as simply “Facebook friends”, that are referred to know in daily-real life. I personally have 739 friends on FB, and really only keep in contact with maybe 50 of them on a semi-regular basis; the rest are just buffer, there to make it seem like people like you. In my early years of FB, I was constantly finding and adding everyone I met, everyone I shared a drink with, or everyone I met through another friend. Now, I’ve relaxed a bit, seeing how unimportant it is to my purposes of FB.

However, with advertising, which is what my Mom’s purpose of FB is, she wants/needs to get her name out to as many people as possible. I told her, you don’t HAVE to keep tabs on everyone we are adding here, but for purposes of your credibility in your business, you need to make it look like you have a lot of people that like you. If you only have a few dozen friends: first of all, who is going to trust you to competently complete your business, second, people are not going to be as willing to use your business if they get the impression people don’t like you, and third, you won’t have as many people, who will in turn invite their people, to your business page. Bottom line: you don’t have to like the person, or care at all about them, to be FB Friends.

This is still a concept that I have to remind my Mom about. Just last weekend we were sitting together adding people. In the beginning of our session, yep I’m getting paid by the hour, she was still quite hesitant about adding certain people she barely knew, or had just met at a friend’s house party. I understand this concept is difficult for adults of her generation and older to comprehend. Now, my Mom is quite computer savvy, but when it comes to these virtual forums, she is at a loss. She is still of the mindset of calling and email messaging her friends and family. The short blurbs on FB seem insufficient, because she has a lot more to say (she always has a lot more to say). This shows how different mindsets have evolved in order to work with the fast pace of things like FB. My Mom has worked on just writing short comments, however she is quite unaware of the text etiquette that perpetually plagues her text messages (thankfully only to me) and now her FB comments. She sounds mad in every one of them! So, next is to explain to her the typing etiquette required of seeming friendly on FB.