Official Facebook statistics can be hard to come by aside from the few that the company publishes at its whim. Fortunately for us, there are many data fiends, marketers and organizations who keep close track of Facebook stats through surveys and research of their own. Individual numbers can be misleading, but combined they form a compelling picture that help us to better understand who uses Facebook and what their interests on the social network are.
We’ve done the legwork and compiled a list of 50 pieces of new Facebook data that online marketers and brand managers should take note of. As you will see, new and existing customers are drawn to unique content and information from brands but turned off by too much. While brand pages are becoming ubiquitous, we still have more to learn regarding the hallowed ‘Like’ button and advertising CTRs. Bottom line: provide interactive, consistent information and respond to consumers’ changing wants and needs. When applicable and possible, we’ve included original sources.
General Facebook Statistics:
1. Facebook currently boasts over half a billion users, with 50% of them logging on daily (Facebook).
2. If Facebook were a country, it would rank 3rd in population behind only China and India. That’s up two spots since last year.
3. The social network giant continues to see significant growth and closed out 2010 with 7.9 new registrants per second (SocialBakers.com).
4. Facebook recently trumped Google as the top source of traffic routed to other major portals.
Facebook Users’ Demographics:
5. The top three countries with the largest numbers of Facebook users are the United States, Indonesia and the United Kingdom (SocialBakers.com).
6. Nearly half of all Americans (42.3%) use Facebook, whereas 7% of Americans have a Twitter account (eMarketer).
7. 70% of Facebook users reside outside of the U.S.
8. The U.S. is not represented in the top 5 global cities with the most Facebook users. They are in order: Jakarta (Indonesia), Istanbul (Turkey), Mexico City (Mexico), London (U.K.) and Bangkok (Thailand) (SocialBakers.com).
9. Usage of Facebook in Asia and Africa has increased dramatically in the past year with Asia increasing its user base by 24% and Africa 27% in the first 3 months of 2011 (SocialBakers.com).
10. Users aged 18-24 constitute the largest single age demographic on Facebook, but the 65+ crowd was the largest growing segment year over at a whopping 124% (SocialBakers.com).
11. Both men and women have an average of 130 friends on Facebook.
12. Women have 55% more wall posts than their male counterparts (HubSpot blog).
Facebook Usage:
13. According to a Nielsen poll, Americans spend 25% of their online time on social networks. Facebook dominates those networks, taking the lion’s share of 85%.
14. Americans spend 13.9 billion minutes on Facebook each year.
15. People aged 18-24 share more information via Facebook than they do via email (76% to 70% respectively).
16. Over 250 million people engage with Facebook every month via external websites.
Facebook Marketing, Advertising & Commerce:
17. Social networks are visited by three-quarters of the world’s global online consumers (Nielsen Report).
18. Over 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including 80 of comScore’s top 100 U.S. websites (Facebook).
19. 71% of recent respondents say reviews from friends and family exert the single greatest influence on their buying decisions (Booz & Co., 2011).
20. According to a recent Facebook survey, 49% of users say they feel better about brands that have a presence on the social networking site.
21. Social commerce sales are expected to increase 6-fold by 2015 (Booz & Co. Report, 2011).
22. 5% of businesses with a Facebook page currently have a Facebook storefront for direct sales.
23. The original Facebook ‘Share’ button evolved into the ‘Like’ button. The new button has additional features such as providing a full story on the user’s wall to broadcast to their network.
24. 68% of users 18-24 years old clicking the new ‘Like’ button do so to gain further information about a brand or product (Compete.com).
25. The average user clicks the Facebook ‘Like’ button 9 times each month.
26. Food & beverage companies take 5 out of the top 10 spots of most popular brands on Facebook including CocaCola (1), Starbucks (2), Oreo (3), RedBull (5) and Skittles (6) (SocialBakers.com).
27. Coca-Cola receives 4 new fans on Facebook PER SECOND (SocialBakers.com, 2010).
28. In a recent study, users who ‘liked’ a Houston-based coffee chain made 36% more visits to the brick-and-mortar business than their non-‘Liking’ counterparts and claimed to have 41% greater loyalty to the brand (Rice University and Dessert Gallery research).
29. Advertising on Facebook is expected to hit $4 billion USD in 2011 (WebTrends Facebook Advertising Performance Benchmarks & Insights).
30. Facebook’s Click-Thru-Rate (CTR) went down in 2010, and Cost-Per-Click (CPC) nearly doubled to US $0.49.
31. 624= the average number of fans a Facebook page has.
32. 1-3= recommended daily page posts for brands to avoid being viewed as spam.
33. Worst offenders of ‘spamming’ fans include Sapo Portugal, Asos Fashion and Forever21, who posted averages of 13, 5 and 3 daily posts respectively with low corresponding engagement rates (ERs) of 0.06%, 0.02% and 0.002% (SocialBaker.com).
34. 49% of American consumers give the ‘Like’ to brands on Facebook to gain information, but over half of them say they never visit the page afterwards.
35. 38% of users hide page updates from the brands they ‘Like’. (Exact Target, Subscribers, Fans and Followers Report).
Facebook Mobile:
36. There are over 200 million active Facebook Mobile users (Facebook).
37. Facebook Mobile users are twice as active as their non-mobile counterparts
38. 75% of Japan’s social networking users access their favorite sites on their mobile devices (Japan Mobile SNS Study, SlideShare).
39. Seeking to broaden its global mobile reach, Facebook purchased Snaptu, a software developer for non-smartphones, in March of this year (2011).
Facebook Mulimedia:
40. Facebook recently rose to the number 3 position in unique videos streamed online (Nielsen).
41. 3 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook each month.
42. 5 billion pieces of interactive content are shared on Facebook weekly.
43. There are over 900 million interactive objects on Facebook today.
Facebook Apps:
44. Over 70% of users utilize at least one Facebook app every month.
45. 53% of Facebook users play games while on the social network with 56 million users playing daily. 19% claim a self-diagnosis of addiction to those games.
46. 69% of all Facebook gamers are women. 50% of them log in strictly to play games.
47. 20% of Facebook gamers have paid cash to play.
Facebook Random Stats:
48. 14% of users who have dogs say they have created a Facebook profile page for their four-legged friend (FacebookFlow.com).
49. Facebook as an entity ranks below airline and cable television companies in a national customer satisfaction survey (ACSI Commentary July 2010).
50. According to a new study, 1 in 5 Americans use social media to make health care decisions. The CDC’s page has over 80,000 fans (National Resource Corporation Survey, 2011).
