Last week, The New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan began tolling an early death knell for Facebook in her article, “Facebook Exodus.” According to Heffernan, despite the fact that people are continuing to join Facebook and “compulsively visit the site,” she claims that many people are abandoning Facebook for a variety of reasons-from its heavy-handed tracking of users for marketing purposes to the breakdown in privacy to the heartbreak (yes, heartbreak!) some users feel when “friends” drop them in a public forum. Heffernan says one user compared Facebook to a kids’ new toy-once the novelty wears off, it gets tossed aside.

I think Heffernan may be onto something here. I recently received suggestions from Facebook to “friend” my 70-something aunts and uncles. If this isn’t a clear sign that Facebook has gone too mainstream, I don’t know what is. Thankfully, it hasn’t reached my parents yet-that may be the day I quit myself!  Seriously though, if Facebook users are increasingly over 50 and the site is already being abandoned like my Quik-Curl Barbie once was a few days after Christmas, it begs a couple of questions:

1) Is Facebook’s usefulness as a social media marketing tool beginning to lose its cache?  

2) As PR practitioners, how do we best advise our clients which social media tools are right for their business and for how long?

Social media is still a developing medium. Many of the elements we collectively group together as “social” are still in the early fad stage and largely unproven. We have no way of knowing which will stick and which will go the way of MySpace, which in a two short years has gone from a “must be on it” social network to place primarily used by musicians for self-promotion. All the cool kids once on MySpace gave it up for Facebook long ago. Will, as Heffernan’s article implies, Facebook share a similar fate?

There’s no easy answer to that question, and if I could answer it, I could just pack it in and retire right now! What I do know is that these things come in waves. In PR, businesses must be smart about which waves they surf and which they choose to stand and watch. When mediums such as Facebook and Twitter are new, hip and exciting and early adopters are clamoring to join the wave, the pressure to conform can be overwhelming. After all, that’s how marketing works – it needs to stay ahead of the curve. 

Technology companies feel this pressure every day, particularly when it comes to figuring out how best to mine the emerging social media landscape. Many have begun to engage Facebook as a marketing tool by building “fan pages”. For consumer brands, a Facebook Fan page can be a good tool to build and maintain a community of brand enthusiasts. Facebook Fan pages for Apple Computer, the iPhone or the Wii, for example, make perfect sense to me. Are fan pages also an effective tool for B2B technology companies? It depends. If it’s just a static page of information like news releases or company events that can be easily found on the corporate website, then Facebook adds little value. If you use Facebook to cultivate an active developer community or user group-why not? The bottom line is to know your objectives in advance and be specific about what you want out of social media. Just jumping on the bandwagon will be completely unproductive or potentially damaging to your brand.

I feel Twitter is much better suited as a social media channel for the news-driven nature of PR and B2B campaigns in general. Unlike Facebook’s slow-moving walls, it’s much more dynamic. I can learn up to the minute news or link through to more in-depth information – and I get the added bonus of personality and opinion rather than press release repostings and pictures from the company picnic. I don’t have to worry about whether anyone I follow is actually my “friend” or not, whether they’ll post embarrassing pictures of me with a bad ’80s perm, or whether I’ve insulted anyone by not following them. I can tweet my client’s news or retweet industry articles and not wonder if I’m annoying people I care about. It’s also not profiling me for advertising purposes or making me vulnerable to fraud through the people in my network or quizzes I’ve taken. On Twitter, I can actually follow and get interesting updates from the journalists and other influencers in the industry I need to follow. Kara Swisher of AllThingsDigital isn’t going to friend me on Facebook anytime soon or consider a pitch I post on her Wall. But on Twitter, I can follow her professional musings and even pitch her when relevant. 

My prediction: Facebook will ultimately become a medium for the branding and advertising facets of marketing, particularly for consumer brands where creating a personal affinity with a product is desirable. B2B companies will likely lose interest in using it for marketing within a couple of years. Twitter, on the other hand, will evolve into more of a business tool, with less emphasis on the personal and mundane. And something else will come along soon enough that will upend the process yet again…

So, what do you think?