The 750 plus million users of social media giant Facebook are an attractive proposition to any advertiser and Social Code, a Facebook-focused agency, has gone one step ahead and worked out the dynamics of the users. A research study by Social Code has come up with a conclusion that older users are more likely to click on Facebook ads while younger users tend to click the Like button.
Over a period of 10 months and after examining over 4 million data points across 50 client companies from a wide range of industries, the study aimed at learning how age and gender affect click-through rates (CTR) and Facebook Like rates. The study found that apart from being older, Facebook ad clickers are more likely to be women.
The findings of the study were as follows:
The oldest segment in the study, 50+ year-old users, are 28.2% more likely to click through and youngsters in the age group of 18-29 are 9% more prone to click the Like button.
As against the rest of the younger population on Facebook, 50+ users see a 22.6 percent higher CTR and a 8.4 percent lower Like rate.
When broken down by gender, age has a much more pronounced effect on CTR for women than it does for men, whereas for men there is a stronger effect on the Like rate than for women:
Overall, women are 11 percent more likely to click on an ad.
Men are 2.2 percent more likely to Like an ad than women are.
For women, CTR is 31.2 percent higher for the 50+ age group versus 18-29 year olds, while men only see a 16.2 percent difference between the age groups.
Versus all age groups, 50+ women’s CTR is 22 percent higher versus a 16.4 percent difference for men.
This implies that women do not always click the ‘Like’ button, they prefer to browse to the corresponding website and presumably look around.
The oldest male segment has an 11.7 percent lower Like rate than the youngest segment, and a 9.5 percent lower Like rate versus all age groups. Women only see a 7.2 percent and 7.9 percent difference, respectively.
Laura O’Shaughnessy, CEO of Social Code said in a statement, “Younger Facebook users are more comfortable using the Like button than older users at this point. With inline fan ads on Facebook, older users have a high level of interaction and curiosity about the ads as evidenced by their higher CTRs whereas younger users have a higher propensity to click the ‘Like’ button in an ad on Facebook. We assume that while older users are adopting Facebook at a high rate, they are also the newest subset to join the social network meaning they may not have high friend numbers so ads are less likely to have social context in advertisements.”
The findings of the Social Code was confirmed by an earlier survey conducted by Barkley ahead of the Share.Like.Buy conference in September – ‘American Millennials’. The Barkley study found that millennials, defined here as consumers between ages 16-34, were more likely than older adults to Like a brand on Facebook and did so more ofter and interaction rates were also somewhat higher.
The American Millennials survey found that over half of millennials liked checking out brands on social media sites vis a vis one-third of older adults. The survey conducted in partnership with the Service Management Group and sponsored by Boston Consulting Group also found that a third of millennials likes brands more if they use social media, and, yet 30% of them thought it was annoying for brands to be on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The study also showed that 23.5% interacted with content from a brand’s Facebook page atleast once a day vs 17% of older adults who did the same.
This confirms that brands have the opportunity to not only attract younger adults as fans of their brands but also interact with them, as long as it does not annoy them.