"Do you know the confounding thing about Facebook?” a colleague confided in me. "Just when we thought we had the whole social media thing figured out, their demographic takes a major shift!” What he was referring to was the fact that young people have spurned Facebook in favor of other social media sites such as Twitter, SnapChat, and Instagram. Facebook has evolved to a much friendlier environment for advertisers, but those who wanted to market to the very young are finding that the young have left the billion-viewer site and those who are using Facebook are much older and not nearly as tech savvy as the youngsters.

As the ever-changing world of technology meets marketing, you can expect to see more of this. What happened to cause this shift? First of all, Facebook caught on with the parents of the Gen Y crowd and the kids don’t exactly want mom and dad "liking” everything they post. But there is something more that you have to understand about the values of the young generation. They don’t like to be "sold” in the traditional sense of advertising. This is where Facebook stepped over the line with them. Their sponsored advertising running down the right column of the page was too in-your-face for the younger generation, who would prefer to buy something based upon the experience of their friends. That is why the "like” first came about on Facebook.

I used the word values to describe the preferences of the younger generation. Let me clear up two key concepts that are very important in marketing with social media - or any media for that matter. Values are beliefs that become engrained in us and rarely change in a person as they enter adulthood and live out the rest of their lives. They should not be confused with attitudes, which will change as opinions shift. In our example above, Gen Y has changed its mind about Facebook. However, they have not changed their mind about using technology or making decisions based on what their friends like. Facebook, as the preferred social media site, has changed. That is an attitude. Using technology as a primary source of communication is not going to change. That is a value. When you are marketing to a specific age group, it will do you well to understand what is a value and what is an attitude. Both impact the culture of your target market. Attitudes will come and go and you can market to what is hot now. You cannot effectively market if you violate the values of the group.

There is a third component that will impact the culture to which you are marketing. It is choice. The more choices you have, the more it impacts attitudes and it shapes our values. For instance, if there were no such thing as social media or mobile phones, how would the younger generation communicate? Would they use a landline phone, like I did when I was a kid? It would shape their values if all of their conversations were spoken and audible instead of texted and photographed. Choice factors into everything we do. We are surrounded by it. Go into a grocery store and see how many choices you have for every item on the shelves. It causes us to expect to have more than one solution to everything we do. This means that marketing is a multiple choice proposition instead of a one solution answer. If you market saying that your product is better than other choices available, you will have a better shot at making a sale than if you say it is the exclusive choice. Exclusivity in today’s market is looked on with a skeptical eye. That ploy will be challenged because people believe they can do a simple Google search and find another option.