Students Still Find Facebook Cool

Some people have suggested that students are becoming less interested in social networking, now that so many others (i.e., parents and other “old” people) are also using it. But according to survey results released on Monday by Anderson Analytics, college students are still overwhelmingly using social networks, particularly Facebook.

Anderson found that 82% of male students and 90% of female students considered Facebook cool. And just 6% of students reported not using a social network at all, according to data that Anderson Analytics’ Tom H.C. Anderson sent me.

This is certainly good news for social networks because, as Tom Anderson points out in his blog post, it means that sites like Facebook are truly engrained in students’ lives.

That said, I do think there are signs that students are using social networks differently than newer users might. In my recent report “College Students Online: Connecting With the Connected Crowd” (available to Total Access subscribers) I looked at data from Alloy Media + Marketing, which found that just 16% of students changed their social network status at least daily. These students also were highly likely to limit who could view their profile and to generally interact with only a small circle of friends.

These things indicate that Facebook’s push toward openness and lifestreaming—using social networks to publish regular updates about daily life and making those updates accessible to many people—may not necessarily sit well with college students. They may ultimately prefer to use social networks the way Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had intended: as an easy way to interact with existing friends and only a limited number of others.

So yes, students do use social networks, but it will be important to pay attention to how they use them and whether that is changing over time.