Sunday

Canadian Facebook Statistics

After playing with the Facebook Flyer this afternoon, I wanted to share some interesting and current Canadian based statistcs from the network.

Much has been said about the popularity of Facebook. With over 35 million profiles and many more each day, it has become one of the most popular social networks (based on North American publicity, not total users) around today.

Facebook recently added a Flyer function to the site. Flyers are similair to Google's AdWords. You simply type in the people you want to target, a quick message, our maximum pay-per-click amont and you're off.

What I found interesting with the Flyer was the ability to immediately search Facebook's database and analyize the terabytes of information it stores.

From ages to likes and interests, you have the ability to manage all the information and create highly targeted ads for a low cost-per click (CPC) rate.

Some interesting stats:

- There are 7,669,540 Canadian users (20,655,580 in the US)

- 2,601,140 Male / 3,553,580 Female (34%-66%)

- 633,300 people are Liberals, 291,420 are Conservatives

- 2,102,540 people are single (1,433,640 are married)

- 18-24 Demographic; 2,614,540

- 29-40 Demographic; 1,854,640

- 413,960 people over 50

- 75,060 people like Radiohead, 46,740 like The Tragically Hip

- 1,320 people like Paris Hilton, 4,520 like Britney Spears

- 108,620 people like The Hills, 12,140 like the Hour

- 2,600 people work at Rogers, 4,000 at Telus and 4,600 at Bell

When Facebook opens up like this, it allows anyone to search through and target the exact type of person they want.

In the next couple of weeks, we're going to test Facebook Flyers against a small budget of $20 dollars. With a cost-per click of around 10 cents, that should generate approximately 200 additional hits to the blog.

We'll measure the traffic with our blog counters (Blog Counter and Google Analytics) and compare them with the results that Facebook provides.

All in all, really interesting stuff from one of Canada's favorite sites.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post Ty.

Some interesting findings...didn't think females would be so dominant on FB...and I'm sure Bell isn't too happy they've got the most users our of those three companies.

Don't want to pitch you in a comment, but couldn't see your coordinates. If you send me an email. I've got a cool Halloweenogram from an online ad agency thought you'd be interested in checking out.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the post, Cyrus. Please feel free to email me at t_turnbull@hotmail.com.

Would love to check out anything neat and happy to post!

Thanks again for the comment and hope to hear from you soon.

Anonymous said...

Even more interesting will be the release of Facebook's new advertising model on November 6.

That and the fact that Microsoft's investment is equivalent to blocking the triple word tile with a four point score.

Unknown said...

Nice one, TB.

Although the release of the new Facebook ad model will be interesting (and high profile because it is happening next week at Ad Tech), I still feel that it will be what everyone expects; targeted executions based on the information displayed in a profile.

What many people seem to forget is that Facebook has one of the lowest click-through rates in the social network game (just 0.04%).

Think about it. You buy 10 million impressions on FB and statistics say that you should only get approximately 4,000 clicks.

Now that people have clicked through to your site, what is the actual conversion rate that they will buy the product? 1 in 10 if you're lucky?

So you've just paid (hopefully) for 400 purchases. Depending on your product, that could be extremely low (but for high quality ones, it might be better).

All in all, target executions should help the click-through rate but it's not the answer to everything!