iStrategyLabs

Facebook Demographics and Statistics Report 2010 – 145% Growth in 1 Year

By Peter CorbettcloseAuthor: Peter Corbett Name: Peter Corbett
Email: peter@istrategylabs.com
Site: http://www.twitter.com/corbett3000
About: Peter is the CEO of iStrategyLabs and his full bio is in the About section.See Authors Posts (109) on January 4th, 2010

Posted in Social Media Marketing, Social Media Monitoring, Social Network Analysis

We’re 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 103 million US based users. The following data shows the growth rates of various user bases in Facebook over the one year period from 1/4/2009 to 1/4/2010. All data comes directly from Facebook’s Social Ads system:

Key Insights:

1. Facebook’s US user base grew from 42 million to 103 million in 2009. That’s a 144.9% growth rate!
2. The 35+ demographic now represents more than 30% of the entire user base.
3. The 55+ audience grew a whopping 922.7% in 2009.
4. Atlanta had the highest growth rate in 2009 at 267.6%

You can download an excel spreadsheet of this data here

Top 15 Most Shared Content on the Web in 2009

By Peter CorbettcloseAuthor: Peter Corbett Name: Peter Corbett
Email: peter@istrategylabs.com
Site: http://www.twitter.com/corbett3000
About: Peter is the CEO of iStrategyLabs and his full bio is in the About section.See Authors Posts (109) on December 30th, 2009

Posted in Digital Word of Mouth, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Monitoring, Social Network Analysis

I’m a big fan of Clearspring, which is a DC based widget platform and social ad network. We’ve been building widgets using their technology for a couple years (lots of examples here).

What most people don’t know is that they own a super awesome piece of technology called AddThis as well – which allows publishers to easily distribute their content to something like 230+ social networks and book marking services.

The real power in AddThis is the fact that their sharing widget is embedded in over 550,000 Web sites, touching over 600 million people world wide per month,  loaded over 1.3 billion times per day. That kind of reach enables them to know which content is being shared the most, and to which services.

The following is the a list of the top 15 most shared pieces of content on the web in 2009 according to their data:

1. Santa Yourself – 71,848 shares

2. The Kim Komando Show – Video of the Day – African thunderstorm – 50,008 shares

3. Pawnation – “Suprised Kitty” Rampages Across Nation – 32,270 shares

4. disinformation – Cannabis College Now Enrolling Students –  24,338 shares

5. Pawnation – Viral ‘Extreme Shepherding’ Ad Campaign Lights Up the Welsh Hills – 18,165 shares

6. TMZ – Michael Jackson Dies – 13,481 shares

7. Mercola.com – Swine Flu — One of the Most Massive Cover-ups in American History – 12,722 shares

8. lemondrop – Best. Wedding Entrance. Ever. – 12,693 shares

9. Pawnation – Faith the Two-Legged Dog Turns Seven This Christmas – 11,546 shares

10. CNBC – Santelli’s Tea Party – 11,020 shares

11. tom’s hardware – Best Graphics Cards For The Money: November ‘09 – 10,802 shares

12. PopEater – Ukrainian Has Definitely ‘Got Talent’ – 10,620 shares

13. Telegraph – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past – 10,502 shares

14. The Kim Komando Show – Video of the Day – Man’s surprising laugh – 7,340 shares

15. El Caso Mascherano – Investigación – Parte 1 – 7,149 shares

One of the more fascinating things you can do with AddThis is compare which sharing services users from individual countries use most. For example, it’s no surprise that Facebook tops the list of overall most popular place to share content to globally. What’s interesting in the comparison below, though, is that Twitter is actually more popular in the UK then Email for sharing – that’s not the case in the US.

2009 Facebook Adoption Report: 36.5% for Universities vs. 5.5% for Community Colleges

By DJ SaulcloseAuthor: DJ Saul Name: DJ Saul
Email: dj@istrategylabs.com
Site: http://www.istrategylabs.com
About: DJ Saul is a Strategist at iStrategyLabs. You can follow DJ on Twitter @DarienJay100See Authors Posts (3) on August 18th, 2009

Posted in Buzz Monitoring, Content Creation, Digital Word of Mouth, Experiential Marketing, Interactive Strategy, Social Network Analysis

In our last post, we showed how the ‘declining’ Facebook numbers of the college-aged can be explained by removing their school affiliations after graduation, (rather than an act of frustration now that Mom and Dad are friending them!).  We thought it might be interesting to look at the actual Facebook usage on the biggest campuses in the country.  We used Facebook Social Ads to crunch the numbers on the top 150 Universities and top 50 Community Colleges with the highest enrollment.  Download the full data set here in XLS format.

There’s a striking difference between the average % of students on Facebook from a State/Private Universities verse Community Colleges.

Source: Facebook’s Social Ads Platform & StateUniversity.com

Top 10 Campuses with the Highest Facebook Adoption: State/Private vs Community College

Source: Facebook’s Social Ads Platform & StateUniversity.com
Contact: DJ@istrategylabs.com

Key Insights:

1)  There is a massive gap between Facebook adoption at State/Private Universities and at Community Colleges, even with similar enrollment numbers.
2)  There are only 19 schools with over 50% of their students using Facebook
3)  Even the school with the highest Facebook adoption (what’s up JMU!) ..is still coming in below 70%

Of course, there are reasons for these figures to be lower than expected.  You don’t need a .edu email address to register a Facebook account anymore, so we could be missing a chunk of students. Additionally, Facebook is no longer requiring students to join a school network.

If Facebook’s Social Ads system is not correcting for this through IP targeting or some other method, marketers are not able to accurately target the college population. As an agency that focuses on youth marketing every day, it’s concerning that our industry/clients assume Facebook captures this entire population – it’ just not the case.

At best, we’re able to reach 2/3 of a college population on a campus like JMU. On average, as we’ve shown, you can only reach about 1/3!