The millennials. They are the next generation, the digital generation. They don't know what life was like before the Internet. They're taking over the world, and we all need to understand the best way to grab their attention and get their money.
But here's the thing. The millennial generation, or Gen Y, is just as diverse as any other. As a group, they certainly show distinctive tendencies and trends. But like Gen X and the baby boomers before them, millennials can be divided into countless subsets by all the usual segmentation suspects. Every single person born between 1980 and 2000 may have age in common, but they are also the most diverse group on the planet and value individuality above almost all else. What's true for one millennial may be anathema to another.
This diversity makes the frenzy around marketing to millennials frequently questionable. For example, the assumption that social media is the be-all, end-all channel for reaching millennials. Sure, they are online and probably a site or two ahead of you on the coolness curve. But while they definitely use social media and help drive its evolution, it's not the only platform they use, and they are not the only ones out there.
Social media as a whole has become virtually age agnostic, used across the demographic spectrum. It's time that we all agree that social media is now a part of our world — part of everybody's world — and it isn't going away.
Mitigating Millennial Myopia: Social Media Beyond Gen Y
The problem with the oversimplification of "social media is for the young" is that it implicitly discredits social as a platform for reaching everyone else. A report comes out that millennials are quitting Facebook, and the marketing world immediately begins looking for other places to direct their efforts. This is a dangerous and faulty knee-jerk reaction. Hundreds of millions of other potential customers are still there, and with less cynicism and overexposure, are probably more receptive to your messages anyway.
