It is interesting to learn from my teammate Nishank and also an article that according to the Statistics Canada, there is an increasing number of tech savvy seniors of age 75 or older (They are one of our team project target customer group)! (Article: Horn (2012) The rise in tech-savvy seniors: report, Source: http://mediaincanada.com/2012/06/25/the-rise-in-tech-savvy-seniors-report/) While there are 98% of them send email and 88% of them use internet at least once a day, only around 53% of them go on social networking websites. Adding friends, ongoing messaging and tweeting on different social platform can be tiring and a tedious job for seniors, what can be use to make social networking experience more simple and interesting?
Why we see having more elderly in the Facebook and other social sites important?
In our project findings, we figured out that sending mass promtional email to elderly could be used as we know that 98% of them will send and read emails. But the major obstacles would be “Where to obtain and renew those email list from time to time? How much would those data cost the company?”
Having more senior surfers moving to the social network not only benefits the nursing agents to reach them more easily, it also help the society to study more closely about their psychological needs, habits and social problems they care about. (Researchers can make use of the Facebook Wisdom Professional tool to study more about the seniors’ habit.)
To make the social networking experience easier, Hootsuite would be the perfect tool! (http://hootsuite.com/)
This online application page enable the users to view multiple social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare… etc in one site.
By clicking on different taps, I can immediately look at the screens and RSS feeds of different sites.
This tool is versitle and save the unwanted work of logging in and loading different sites each time. However the shortcoming of this website application is that the fonts of the contents are too small. It will be harder for the seniors to do the readings. Perhaps it will be better if Hootsuite can launch a senior surfer version of Hootsuite so that more seniors can actively manage their social networks.
Other than the existing functions as shown in the left hand side of the panel, a senior friendly version of Hootsuite may include special deal coupons (Which are linked with the social networking website special promotion page) and also a RSS feed page of community centre events located near to the senior living place.