In a globalized world, we cross cultural boundaries every day. We do business across borders, communicate with pen pals on other continents, and frolic in “ethnic” restaurants, lapping up the novelty of what is foreign to us.
It looks like Matt Dickman at Techno//Marketer has been celebrating the official eclipse of Facebook’s 100 million user mark… with some hard-nosed number crunching. In his e-book The Face of Facebook, you’ll find a staggering array of metrics that seem to elude general fact-finding (the data is from September of 2008). Some are obvious: the US has the most registered users (approximately 29 million Americans on Facebook).
Others are a little less obvious, and if you look at some of these cross-eyed, they really raise some interesting questions about Facebook as a platform.
A) What country has the largest share of citizens on Facebook?
- Canada
- Norway
- United Kingdom (U.K.)
- Australia
- Chile
- Denmark
- Hong Kong
- Iceland
- Sweden
- Singapore
You generally expect to see the Scandinavian countries turning up for metrics like these… but Canada? I’d be willing to lump them in with the Nordic region and call Facebook a hockey-centric platform, but then the Brits and Aussies had to spoil the show. And then Chile comes in out of left field and shows us that Latin America can be at the technological forefront as well. Someone should control for this data against demography, to see how this list turns out after you balance for age distribution among populations. Any takers? Winner gets a York Peppermint Patty.
B) What country is growing the fastest on Facebook?
- Italy
- Uruguay
- Belgium
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Serbia
- Denmark
- Switzerland
- Bosnia
- Chile
Lately there are a lot of reasons to bet against Italy when it comes to innovation (I am an Italian national, if I can admit it, I hope we all can). So this was kind of a surprise. But if you piece together fragments of the former Yugoslavia, it becomes pretty obvious: prowess in football (or what Americans call soccer) is clearly driving growth on Facebook. (Of course perennial hall monitor Switzerland crashes that party.)
Interesting to note that in terms of volume of users added in the 30 days leading up to this research, Chile was #1 and out of nowhere, France at #2. But then step back and it all makes sense: France is still stewing from the shaming of its country following a dramatic loss to Italy in the 2006 World Cup final, and this is payback. Personally, I’d rather have the Cup.
3) What age group is growing the fastest in the U.S.?
Let’s get serious for a second; this is one thought ought to make any marketer perk up. We’ll dispense with the drama and just say it: the 36-40 age segment is growing the fastest on Facebook. If you want to broaden that a bit, it’s really the 31-50 crowd that is adopting it the fastest. A social network where you can sell to both baby boomers and teeny boppers? I’m not sure Doc Brown ever made this prediction in Back to the Future… but if he had, he would have been right (like everything else).
