Five Reasons Why Seniors Should Embrace Facebook

Facebook is a pretty darn expansive, one-stop-shop, for all of your social networking needs. With over 500 million users, it is no wonder that the site happens to be one of the most popular and influential internet destinations. Ever since Facebook expanded their user-base in 2006, seniors have slowly been joining the site. Though, in comparison to other age-groups, seniors are still lagging behind in Facebook representation.

So we are here to provide five good reasons for aging adults to join Facebook……

5. Fan-Photo-Tastic — Facebook is a great place to upload and share photos. Users have the ability to create albums for all sorts of events — weddings, birthdays, vacations — and then “tag” the photographs accordingly. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of “tagging,” you link up a subject in the picture with his/her name and Facebook profile.) The best part of Facebook’s photo functionality is how it allows us, the users, to easy share our photos with our friends and family. Likewise, we have the ability to look at and appreciate the photos that our friends upload.

4. Reconnect — By any chance do you have a long-lost friend that you have been dying to get in contact with? Well, Facebook might provide you with that opportunity to befriend an old mate and catchup. Search for an old friend and see what they are doing with their time; nothing feels as good as reconnecting with a friend from the past.

3. Streamline Your Internet — The internet frequently feels a bit too sprawling, too disconnected, and even unorganized. With one site for your email, another for your chatting, another for getting your news, one for status updates, and yet another to watching videos, it might seem overly complicated and ultimately disorienting. But with Facebook, you can accomplish all of these goals in one location. This is a nice feature for seniors who might be a bit intimidated with the internet and might appreciate this relatively streamlined, simple approach to the web.

2. Embrace Applications — Applications on Facebook are a hidden gem, a rarely discussed yet highly useful part of the site. MarketPlace allows you to sell and buy goods a la Craigslist but in a safer environment, Quiz Monster enables you to actually create your own quizzes (neat!) for your friends to take, and Family Tree, one of our favorite Facebook apps for seniors, acts a a virtual genealogical tool. The applications on Facebook are numerous; we suggest you take the opportunity to explore.

1. Communicate — At its essence, Facebook is about building and managing an online persona as a means to communicate and interact with others. While this activity might seem a bit daunting for novices, it is also downright entertaining! A lot of seniors feel as if they rarely find themselves in novel, exciting social situations. Facebook allows us to explore a new social territory, and that is, unequivocally, a good, stimulating thing.