The face of Facebook - a comprehensive eBook for marketers

As a marketer and blogger, there is no shortage of noise about Facebook as a marketing platform. One of my struggles has been to decipher what is accurate and what is mis-guided hyperbole.

I took it upon myself to get some answers using Facebook's own ad targeting system and I created this abridged eBook for marketers to give you a snapshot of what the real face of Facebook looks like on a Global and US level.

Click either of the links below to download this 25 page eBook for free:

High-resolution eBook (3.1 Mb) | Low-resolution eBook (944 Kb)

The eBook answers the following questions:

• What does the global population look like on Facebook?
  
• What percentage of the 90 million users are outside the US?
  
• Which countries have the highest percentage of their total citizens on Facebook?
  
• What is the age/gender breakdown of the US Facebook population?
  
• How many members are over the age of 25/30/40?
  
• What options can I use to reach my audience?
  
• How targeted can I get in order to avoid waste?
  
• How much is it going to cost to reach them?
  

A couple of interesting points that struck me:

• 25.33% of Canadians are on Facebook compared with 9.47% of Americans and 0.01% of people in China
  
• The US has the highest number of users on Facebook at nearly one third of the total user base
  
• There are more women than men in every US age category
  
• 84.07% of US Facebook users are under 30 years of age
  
• There is a distinct "long-tail" pattern when you look at the adoption levels of countries
  

This is a report that I will be updating on a monthly basis to show how the population is changing and how marketers can respond. Is there anything else that you want to see?

UPDATE: Jeremiah Owyang has a great post today on new "engagement ads" from Facebook. Will definitely keep you posted as these roll out into beta.

Technorati Tags: advertising, Facebook, marketing, Matt Dickman, social media, social networks, Techno//Marketer, trends, Face of Facebook

Comments

[David Weiner]

Matt,

This is a tremendously valuable report which I will be sharing with all of my colleagues and clients. Thanks for your hard work!!!

DW

[Matt Dickman]

David -- That's awesome! Glad you enjoyed it, going to be doing a number of these on similar topics through the year. Thanks for reading.

[Adam Kmiec]

Matt

Nice job as usual. I had seen a similar report form RapLeaf that looked at all social networks. Yours is a nice evolution forward.

Best

Adam

[Andrea Hill]

Thanks! You've validated my hunch: I felt that a higher percentage of my Canadian friends were on FB than American!

I struggle with your reference to the long tail, however.. I feel as though the long tail is generally used as an indication of how there is a market for less popular selections. Here, you're always referencing FB, so the analogy didn't quite seem to fit..?

[Matt Dickman]

Adam -- Glad you enjoyed. Will look for the Rapleaf report as well.

Andrea -- Canadians are absolutely using Facebook more per capita.

With the long tail example, you have to look at Facebook as a market. While Chris Anderson put this theory into a product niche example, it's not a new theory and has been studied for some time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

What I see is that the market is distributed with a very heavy top weighting. However, with Facebook's targeting options marketers can reach people 1-to-1 the same at the end of the tail as they can in the head. I thought the graphic representation was interesting.

[Jim Fisher]

Matt,

Thanks for providing your eBook. I love stuff like this!

Jim

[Katherine]

Hi Matt,

Just stumbled on your e-book; great work! It sets out the potential reach of facebook really clearly.

However, wondering what your personal opinion is on the claims that while we can specifically target our ads, facebook users are too busy looking at content to notice advertising?

I've been some people complain that their campaigns were targeted but not effective, would love to hear what you think!

Cheers!

[Becky Carroll]

Matt, this is great! Would it be all right with you if I shared this with the UCSD Ext social media marketing class that I am teaching?

You rock!

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