Forgive me but I tried to go for the longest post title in history. We’ve been granularly tracking Facebook’s growth since October 2007, which at the time it had a mere 20 million US users. Today it has over 146 million US based users. The following data shows the growth rates of various userbases in Facebook over the one year period from 1/4/2010 to 1/4/2011. All data comes directly from Facebook’s Social Ads system:
Key takeaways:
- According to e-Marketer, there are 206.2 million US internet users. That means 71.2% of the US web audience is on Facebook.
- The 18-24 (college) demographic grew the fastest at 74% in one year.
- Perhaps Facebook’s new “Like” structure drove this metric, but liking “Drugs” is up 1131.9% this year.
I thought it would be interesting to get exact counts of Facebook users based on their specific employment. Seeing as that iStrategyLabs is based in DC it only made sense to check out how our Federal friends were during on “the Facebook”. The data is broken out nationally and by if the employee is based in DC. Also, due to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – I was curious to see how many of our armed forces personel were openly looking for same sex hookups. Keep in mind, the general US Facebook population is 2.01% gay (full report on Gays on Facebook is here). Here goes nothing:
Comments
AWESOME STATS! Thanks. I work on the social media initiative for Houston Association of REALTORS®. One of the largest REALTOR® associations in the country with around 25,000 members. Thanks for sharing again.
Hi! Quick Question – is there a typo in the 2011 “18-24 year old” users section? The US population between the ages of 18 and 24 is only around 30 million. If Facebook says they have 45 Million US users, that means they have a user and a half for every person!
Does anyone know how many impressions an average facebook status update gets?
Roughly 10-30% of a fan base see any given page post. About 10% of your friends see your status updates.
@Corbett3000 — I would LOVE to see the source for those stats, if you can share.
Pulled from http://Facebook.com/ads/create
Facebook to me seems to be a great place to brand yourself . Networking is key to any business today. It’s not the same world . Yellow pages are a thing of the past and the News paper are not to far away. Would love to learn how to turn friends in dollars?
@Corbett3000 re:the source of your data, all I’m seeing if the webform to create a new ad..how do I access the demographic data from there? Thanks for your great post!!