There was a time when it made sense to obsess over our audience’s age.

When social media was new, early adoption really did skew young. Gen Z grew up native to platforms that Boomers were still figuring out. “Kids these days” were the first to post pictures, then video, then stories. Blog posts and email were for people who remembered life before smartphones. It made sense that our marketing strategies would adapt to fit that context: different content, different formats, different tones, neatly sorted by birth year.

The Shift

This week Meta dropped a global survey of nearly 10,000 people across four generations, and the big story is that the gap between how Gen Z and Boomers actually use the internet has effectively closed.

When they asked them why, and how they use Meta’s various apps (Instagram, Facebook, etc.) the difference was a grand total of four percentage points. There’s only a 4% difference in the ways that the different generations use social media.

The biggest shocker is that short-form video, long held up as the definitive Gen Z format, turns out to be the preferred content type for every single generation, boomers included. Almost nine in ten people across all four generations share photos, videos and memes to stay in touch, and the numbers barely shift by age.

Important point: When they say “share”, they’re not talking about posting Reels. For the most part your grandparents may not be dancing on camera, but they are sharing content that they like in DMs just about as frequently as people in their 20s.

Where it Gets More Interesting

If generation isn’t the meaningful variable, what is? The data points clearly to two things: life stage and interest.

Someone going through a major transition: getting married, having a baby, buying a home, etc. shows up to 26 percentage points higher in purchase intent than someone who isn’t. And that’s true regardless of their age. A 28-year-old and a 54-year-old who are each planning a wedding are, behaviourally, the same person. They’re consuming roughly the same content, feeling the same emotional pull, and are far more similar to each other than either is to their same-aged peers who aren’t in that life stage.

The interest parallel is just as useful. A Gen Z who is deeply into fly fishing is going to engage with content online in ways that look a lot more like a Boomer who loves fly fishing than they do like a Gen Z who loves gaming. And of course the algorithm knows that, so if you were to grab both of their phones and scroll their feeds, they would look surprisingly similar.

So What?

Leaning on age-based segmentation as your primary strategic lens has become lazy. We’re using crude generational labels to stereotype entire populations of people when the decade that they were born in doesn’t actually tell us much about what they’re into, the types of content that they consume, or even which apps they use most often.

What To Do Instead

Let creators be your guide. Not that you have to dump 100% of your marketing cash into influencer partnerships, but the creators who have broken through have mastered the concept of interest and life-stage based content.

Pay attention to what they’re creating, how they’re connecting with specific pain points, frustrations and aspirations.

The Meta report actually had some interesting data on this topic as well:

Expertise now outranks everything else in what people want from content creators. 81% rated expert knowledge as the most important quality. That’s ahead of humour, relatability, and far ahead of fame (which came last). The scroll, as the report puts it, is becoming school. Tips, tutorials, demonstrations. If your content strategy is built around “being relatable,” you may be competing for the wrong thing.

The report also surfaces a phrase that I love. It’s called “digital pebbling”. Remember when I mentioned that people of all generations are sharing content via DMs and group chats? They compare that to the penguins dropping pebbles at the feet of their mates, little gestures that say: I love you, or I’m thinking about you.

Eight in ten people share Reels at least weekly, and the top reason is to make someone laugh or stay in touch. That’s likely why some of the best performing content that we see are short, simple videos that evoke an emotion, or shows a scene that reminds people of their friends.

I’ll leave you with one more actionable reframe when it comes to your content: start with the moment, not the demographic. What life stage is your best customer likely navigating right now? What transition or interest has activated their attention? That question will tell you more about what to make, what to offer, and where to show up than their birth year ever could.

The generational playbook worked when it reflected reality, but it made us complacent, and the research is telling us that content consumption has become ubiquitous. The question, as Meta puts it, is whether your strategy has caught up.