Last time I explained what Social Media is, but didn’t get too in depth. This time, let’s take a look at Facebook and dig into the stats a bit. It’s pointless to get involved in something without knowing why, so this is where we obviously should start.
Just a few years ago, a college student at Harvard by the name of Mark Zuckerman, along with a few of his roommates and a few other computer science students, decided to start a website to connect students… mostly just because he was bored. The site started as something called Facemash on October 28, 2003. Take a look at what he was doing at the time when he thought of the idea (via Facebook’s Wikipedia entry)
I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
—9:48 pm
Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals . . .), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.
—11:09 pm
Let the hacking begin.
—12:58 am
Apparently it’s true that you can come up with some great ideas when you’re drunk. But enough about the history of Facebook, just be glad that it’s around and available for your business. Let’s take a look at their stats right now though. Currently, Facebook has over 300 million users, and that number is growing every single day. Out of those 300 million, 50% of them log into their accounts every day. 65 million of those people are now accessing their accounts from their mobile devices. Now imagine your brand possibly getting in front of 150 million people on a daily basis and what that can do for your business.
Ok, now get that thought out of your mind, since there’s no way to get yourself in front of all of those people. But what if you could get yourself in front of a few thousand? Sounds more feasible right? And I’m pretty sure that out of those few thousand, you can figure out how to get those people to come check out your website or your store. If you can’t, then keep checking back on this blog for some simple, low-cost ideas.
Now based on the stats that are out there, the average Facebook user has 130 friends, granted many of these friends could be from other parts of the country or even the world far away from your business, but generally they’ll have at least a few friends close to home. Now let’s take a look at how many people you can get the word out to. Say you manage to get 5 people to be a fan of your business. Do the math (5 fans * 130 of their friends, and half of those people are logging on everyday), you end up with 325 people that just saw your business for the first time. Now if even 5 of those people that saw your business become fans, that’s another 325 people that just saw your brand. Sounds simple right? Facebook does all the work for you, you just have to help them out along the way.
Stay tuned to ideas about how to give Facebook that little nudge that it needs. But in the mean time, how does your business tie into these numbers?
- More than 300 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
- Average user has 130 friends on the site
- More than 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
- More than 40 million status updates each day
- More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day
- There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
- There are more females (55.7%) than males (42.2%) on Facebook – 2.2% are of unknown gender. (Really? Unknown Gender?)
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