The chart (below) shows the visit share by age for the big four social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. And the age breakdown of the (US?) online population.

As eMarketer has noted, “The average age of Internet users is rising in tandem with that of the general population.” It appears so far Facebook is the online social network that most closely mirrors the age diversity of our offline world. Twitter continues to appeal to GenX and GenY. And LinkedIn continues to be an excellent if underappreciated network for reaching 55+ adults – 57% of users are baby boomers or beyond!

I was surprised to see Google+ have a larger audience over the age of 55 than Twitter, but on second thought its design and functionality is so similar to Facebook, it might feel more comfortable to older users.

Stat #8 wasn’t a surprise to us. As Dougherty writes, “Facebook” is the most searched term in the US and Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks.” We shared that insight with a team of social media marketing ambassadors from a leading continuing care retirement community just two days ago. It was terrific to see their excitement for how the network could promote deeper relationships with their senior prospects and adult children.

If your organization needs help turning social media stats into social media strategies, please check out these related posts (or give us a call – we’d love to help).

RELATED POSTS:

• The Face(book) in the Mirror is Getting Older
• Can Twitter Drive Sales with Older Generations?
• Mature, Affluent, Educated and LinkedIn
• Gaining Boomer and Senior Marketing Insights from Social Media

MOST CLICKED:

1. Does Google accurately guess age and gender:  Fun article that explores Google’s privacy announcements by testing if this internet search giant can accurately guess your age.  An informal survey within the article of the author’s colleagues found some interesting results in the age category, however the ISP was more able to effectively identify interests was fairly accurate.   Here are few of the age misses the article shares:

• Women aged 24, 25, and 28 were estimated to be men aged 25-34.

• Men aged 30, 41, and 29, plus a 39-year-old woman, were all found to be boomer or seniors aged 65 or older

Try it for yourself

2.  Great Ad Age article that explores the recent disclosures from Paula Deen regarding her health and the impact to her credibility as a brand.  As marketers this piece presents a reminder of how personal a brand is to boomers and seniors and the inability to distinguish (in this case) the person from the brand.

WORTH REPEATING:

A beautiful story in the Huffington Post of caring for senior parents with Alzheimer’s and the grief experienced by all it touches.  Experience a glimpse into the story of one woman as she helps her senior mom deal with a beloved father suffering from this disease.

OVERHEARD (and too funny not to share):

Woman:  “I noticed you limping, is anything wrong?” Gentleman: ” It’s a degenerative issue with my joints that is just too hard to pronounce.  The initials are O.L.D.”

1. MOST CLICKED: Poor photo choice – unprofessional, young – for a press release about marketing to professional baby boomer women. http://bit.ly/w43h1Z

Do you agree with our critique of their image? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Do you worry that your own photography may not be doing the job with baby boomers and seniors? To learn how you can spend less money and see more results with the right photography, download our free eBook – “Photo Finish: Images that Motivate Mature Consumers” – today.

Photo Source: Sirius Bark by Temple3

2. What influences changes in aging brains? 24% of mental #aging due to genes (Wall Street Journal) http://on.wsj.com/y2hPvP

3. MOST SHARED: Apparently consumers use QR codes for the same reason kids touch hot stoves: to see what will happen http://ow.ly/8wSgY

Related Post: A Q&A about QR Codes and Baby Boomers http://bit.ly/yF3yqF

And here’s one link that should have captured more clicks:

Five Ways Content Marketing Connects Brands & Customers (@1to1media) http://ow.ly/8uHBA As Anna Papachristos writes for 1to1Media:

“Joe Chernov, vice president of content marketing at Eloqua, defines content marketing as ‘the art of creating, distributing, and measuring share-worthy content that grows and engages an organization’s audience, while deepening affinity for the brand.’ But as this ‘share-worthy content’ expands in terms of form and delivery, content marketers need to blend old and new tactics to keep their content effective and engaging.”

Some of Papachristos’ five ways may be new to you; others, helpful reminders.

1. Encourage Sharing – with short-form content that engages targets in conversation
2. Solve Problems – with content that is informative, not self-promotional
3. Re-Use and Re-Purpose – to extend the reach of each piece
4. Observe and Report – “Content marketing isn’t about simply dumping a glut of articles or videos online; it’s about strategically presenting customers with particularly
   applicable information at crucial points in the buying cycle.”
5. Serve It Up Social – leverage social networks to extend the reach of your content … and your brand

If you found this content relevant, we hope you’ll use the tools provided to share it with your networks. Thanks!

By far the most shared post was Gaining Boomer and Senior Marketing Insights from Social Media. Find out what messages/strategies are hitting (or missing) the mark. Todd Harff recaps a number of resources that can be extremely helpful in determining and leveraging boomer and senior social preferences and behaviors, including  LinkedIn’s which allows you to see what is generating the most interest segmented by industry or group.

Other Top Tweets:

1. Santa’s Senior Secrets- An infographic chock full of not only holiday cheer but stats on seniors the world over.

2.  Baby Boomer social media revolution: More and more boomers flock to sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  How will you reach them?

3. Seven reasons direct mail and print remain effective marketing tools.

4. Interesting article via @AllThingsAging examining the rise of Ethnogeriatrics within diverse communities.

TOP TWEETS THIS WEEK

1. Holiday homecomings may last a long, long time for Baby Boomer women. Mostly driven by the recession, they’re now housing their adult children and don’t anticipate packing them up any time soon. http://bit.ly/u2VETl

2. Free social media tools your brand should be using to research baby boomers  and seniors bit.ly/vJnNeG

3. Retirement: Busy, but a different kind of busy. http://exm.nr/tTFTv5

4. As people put off moving into any type of senior housing, senior living providers are finding those entering are “significantly older—and in need of more care—than they were several years ago” reports Senior Housing News.  http://bit.ly/slWBXe

5. Featured by SocialMediaToday.com: Gaining Boomer and Senior Marketing Insights from Social Media by @CreatingResults ow.ly/1g6UNC

And a tweet that should have gotten more attention because these are words we can all live by … From Laura Fitton (aka @Pistachio, thought leader and the author of Twitter for Dummies): “Just in case you forget, sometimes http://ow.ly/i/n0AH“

What doesn’t seem to vary is the struggle to act on or measure what your brand gains from social media. As eMarketer notes:

From the early days of the internet, the prospect of detailed metrics fueled the promise that online advertising could yield unprecedented insights about customer preferences and behavior. That promise has only partially materialized. True, online channels provide feedback that offline media cannot, but marketers are still grappling with how to make this input work toward the bottom line.

From my presentation to the International Council on Active Aging (ICAA) last week, here are tools and tips that can help marketers spot and make sense of customer preferences and behavior.

We’ve focused on resources that are built-in or free, and are accessible to organizations like our clients – continuing care retirement communities, estate planners and 50+ housing developers with a lot of heart but little budgets.

Free Social Media Tools You Should Be Using

1. FACEBOOK:

* Facebook Insights: built-in and free, this tool helps you analyze your brand’s page metrics.

- Find out which messages hit (and which miss) their mature marks through “people talking about” and noting which posts attract the most engagement.

- Demographics and locations reported by Facebook also offer (free) insights. We discovered one client’s site was attracting more adult children than prospects themselves. And for another, we found that Friends were quirkier than we thought – one report showed a healthy portion of fans used Facebook with the language set to Pirate. Now our posts contain more humor and get more engagement than before.

* Facebook search: type your brand name into the search bar and then, on the results page, click on Public Posts. As Search Engine Journal put it, “what you’re left with is real time results for wall posts from all (public) profiles or pages on Facebook!”

2. TWITTER:

* TwitterCounter: track follower growth – yours or a competitor’s – for free on a weekly or monthly basis. Upgrade and you can see who is retweeting or sharing your tweets.

* Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Argyle Social, TweetAdder and Co-Tweet are tools for managing your Twitter account. All offer varying degrees of monitoring as well. Our personal favorite is HootSuite. You can track clicks and shares, and set up searches for key phrases (your brand name, your brand plus words such as LIKE, LOVE or HATE). Reports can even be exported and shared, a time-saving feature for smaller organizations.

* Twilert: Baby boomer blogger Linda Bernstein swears by this service, which delivers a regular email update with tweets containing keywords related to your brand, product or service.

3. LINKEDIN:

* Company page Analytics: see at a glance the interest your brand is generating and what kind of traffic, segmented by industry or other selects.

* Group Statistics: visualize your group members by seniority, function, location and industry.

4. SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING:

* There are a number of paid social media monitoring services out there, including Trackur, Radian6, sysomos, Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Alterian. You might first want to read a few comparisons (like this one from FreshMinds) to see what the strengths of each system is.

* A FREE and easy tool is Social Mention: Per MarketingSherpa’s Adam Sutton,

“… more than 80% of marketers say measuring brand sentiment is important, yet fewer than half actually track it. You can start gauging sentiment today by spending two minutes playing with Social Mention.

This fantastically simple and free tool provides a stunning amount of data, including a sentiment analysis of your online mentions. You can even click “positive” and “negative” to see a list of results used to generate your score. How cool is that?”

Very cool indeed.

What tool do you feel is cool for marketers focused on baby boomers and seniors? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

RELATED POSTS

And today’s boomers and seniors are absolutely telling marketers what works – and what doesn’t – in motivating them to buy a product, sign up for a list, join a club or take other actions.

You just have to know what to ask and how to listen.

Unfortunately, many organizations working to attract or motivate older adults aren’t taking advantage of new, digital research methods. Why? I addressed three main reasons in my presentation:

1. Misconception: seniors and boomers are not online or expressing their opinions online
2. Fear: digital research requires costly, specialized tools or platforms
3. Cloudy vision: not seeing the gold to be found in the marketing platforms and services already in use

Didn’t make it to ICAA 2011? Never fear. 

All this week I’ll challenge the obstacles noted above. Posts will share actionable tips for following your customer’s lead. I’ll include lists and links to resources available to organizations of all sizes. And I’ll look to you to lead us to your favorite resources via the comments below.

Mature Market Research 2.0

Thanks to the wild and wooly world wide web, market research has gone from formal and established methods to insights that are often offered informally … sometimes without research “participants” even being aware of what they’re sharing. Data has gone from a hard-earned trickle to a flood. As Tom Webster says, we’re now “drowning in numbers.”

For example, mystery shopping has long been a terrific but time- and person-intensive way to see first hand how sales teams interact with prospects. Or to spot potential turn-offs at an active adult community or destination.

Today, you can mystery shop without ever leaving your keyboard. Want to find out why people leave your floor plan page without first signing up to receive a brochure? Program a quick poll to ask that very question of web visitors. Curious about your sales team’s performance? A few quick web searches for your brand name plus “customer service” can let you know what customers really think.

But Baby Boomers … Seniors … Older People … Aren’t Online, Are They?

Yes, Virginia, there is an older and wired consumer. In fact, the Internet population in recent years looks more like the actual population.[link to another post of ours]

And per Creating Results’ Social, Silver Surfers research we know baby boomers and seniors are expressing their opinions as they interact with websites and social platforms. We found that 36% of 40+ respondents had voted or ranked items online, 25% used comments or message boards to share their thoughts, and 21% had posted a user review.

Voting/Ranking, Blogs, Message Boards and User Reviews are most popular with older Baby Boomers. This mirrors their offline preferences. They love to talk and share; there is value in a peer’s opinion of a product or service.

And that’s just the information they’re volunteering. In the Wall Street Journal’s terrific series “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets,” reporter Julia Angwin writes “… the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.”

While all this can seem scary, there are big benefits to moving to market research 2.0:

* For consumers, they get more relevant content, better customized experiences and time-saving short cuts

* For marketers, you can be more targeted, more cost-efficient and more effective

Tune in tomorrow for ways you can enjoy these benefits by following your customer’s lead online.

Tweet-Worthiest Tweets from the Previous Week

1. An infographic all about tea drove significant interest last week.  Did you know that tea is served with salt and butter in some countries?  Learn all about the wide world of tea with this fun trivia.

2. An insightful New York Times piece from last week provides a further glimpse into the graying workforce and retirement options (or lack of) for boomers and the impact on millennials: http://ow.ly/7HrsX

3. Resolve to stand out in the inbox in 2012, explore  stats on email use by age and create your own recipe for email success: http://ow.ly/7HrJd

4. Creating new Thanksgiving traditions- a sweet piece from The 70-Something Blog about  being thankful for family, health, shelter and peanut butter cups.

Interested In Your Thoughts:

A Q&A about QR codes and Baby Boomers: Do you utilize QR codes for marketing to baby boomers and beyond?  What successes have you seen?  We’d love to hear your thoughts.

During a recent coming together of the marketing minds of Creating Results we discussed the phenomenon of QR codes and their implications in marketing to the mature consumer.  We debated the benefits and challenges and explored several opportunities that could be leveraged for this cohort.

Just the facts, ma’am!

According to a recent article on MarketingCharts.com , 72% of consumers could pick a QR code out of a line up and 55% of those aged 55 and better were familiar with the technology (surprisingly a higher percentage than those 45-54).  The bad news….30% of the same survey respondents across all age breakdowns didn’t know exactly what it was. Further, comScore reported  that those 55-64 and 65+ only make up 7% of overall QR code users.

Media Post’s Online Media Daily also examined usage within advertising avenues  noting that use of QR codes in print rose as much as 228% over the last year.

The QR Recipe for Mature Marketing Success

Mature consumers may not be familiar with this code today, but that shouldn’t stop us from leveraging it.  Here are a few ideas for how marketers can maximize their efforts and aid in fostering an awareness of QR codes among baby boomers and seniors.

1. Spell out HOW: So many times I see QR codes being utilized in advertising with no messaging that alludes to what to do with them.  If your target audience is 55+ consider incorporating directions. It could be as simple as “Scan with your smartphone QR reader.”

2. Create opportunities:  If your organization already offers classes and tech experiences to seniors, why not excite those seniors who already have an established smartphone comfort level? This is a great avenue for CCRCs. Retirement community North Hill, a client of Creating Results, is introducing QR code scanners to members of its iPad club (a group of 70+ early adopters).

3. Know where opportunities exist: One of the cardinal rules of marketing is knowing your target market.  If you know how Boomers typically access information you can determine marketing avenues that would most benefit and be most effective for QR codes.

According to Vertis, 52% of Boomer women rely on ad insertions and print/online coupons and incentives.  Have an upcoming insert scheduled?  Why not incorporate a QR code as a way to gauge how your target will respond.    And as with every avenue you will want to test, test and test until you ensure the perfect storm of elements to motivate to action.

4. Spell out WHY: Boomers and seniors are concerned about their digital privacy and how their information will be used. We heard that over and over again during our Social Silver Surfers research. And they’re incredibly time-strapped – working, caring for elderly parents and adult children and grandchildren. By spelling out the benefits at the other end of the QR code – the what’s in it for me? – you’ll earn their trust and earn a scan.

 
5. Make it worth while: As with any new technology there is a comfort curve for seniors, which is a slightly more extensive than their millennial counterparts.  Make sure that your QR code usage complements your marketing efforts and doesn’t just lead to a landing page replica of your ad.  No one appreciates that and seniors especially will find this inauthentic and unworthy of their time. (And you don’t want to get them there only to lose them).

 
Following this recipe will ensure that your QR codes get the love they deserve and become effective elements of your marketing plan.

1. MOST CLICKED: “What if we cherished our elderly as we worshiped youth?” Hi-impact video from Rogerson Communities.  Thought provoking look at the value of services and care of #Seniors.  Click here to see the full video.

2. MOST SHARED: 27% of Virginia #babyboomers & 19% of VA #seniors say they’re not financially ready for retirement ow.ly/7wGmV.   Informative survey into the insights and perceptions of #boomers.  Other interesting results include 68% #seniors feel prepared for impact of aging and 42% say their communities are ready to meet the needs of that process.  See the full report here: www.olderdominion.org.

Actionable tweets of the week:

1. Blah, blah, blog, #blog: Takeaways from BlogWorld conf from which all can benefit ow.ly/7sDEm

2. Study: radio has positive impact on all stages of purchase funnel ow.ly/7tWPn Chart w/ % lifts ow.ly/7tWSF

3. Understanding paid vs organic search, & why to think LEFT for better results (@tedives) ow.ly/7sEBv

4.Something to think about: Leading retailers commit to paid search, email & SEO in 2012 ow.ly/7sLRG What are your priorities?

5. Shameless plug of the week (and shared case study): Case study on another CCRC website that increased leads from 5/mo to 25/mo after re-design ow.ly/7sAWh