Facebook Ads goes social and useful (?)

When I went into Facebook today I noticed this ad:

Two things struck me as interesting, which I hadn't noticed in Facebook ads before:

• Govermental information related to society
  The ad (for those who don't live in Sweden) tells you that you don't need a little sticker on your number plates from now on. (The sticker was a way to show that you had paid the taxes related to the vehicle).
  This highlights the value of Facebook Ads for other messages than the pure commercial that have been the main part of the ads so far.
  When you click on the ad you end up at the Swedish Transportstyrelsen.
  
• Social recommendations
  Notice the "like"-button, and that two of my friend have "liked" the ad.
  I hadn't noticed this before, but apparently this was announced in August by Facebook.
  (One reason I hadn't noticed might be because there wasn't any ads "liked" by my friend before?)
  This is obviously a way to ensure that the ads as such become more personal relevant for you, in two ways: They are "filtered" by your friends, thus the content might be more likely to be relevant for you and they are "recommended" by your friend - you noticed your friends names and look twice.

That you start to see this type of "useful" information, rather than pure "spam ads", in Facebook leads me to some observations:

• Facebook starts to be seen as a valuable platform for information spreading
  As the Facebook penetration in Sweden continue to grow, now with more than three million users, it's becomming a mainstream channel that is useful not only for businesses.
  
• A targetable information channel
  With Facebook ads you can target the demographics of your receivers quite well, so local information, information for a specific gender and/or age group, information for specific interest groups etc can be effectively spread.
  
• It adds further value to Facebook
  I get more value out of this specific ad than most others than I have seen so far.
  
• More natural placements than Google ads
  My initial reaction was that this specific ad found a better placement through Facebook than it would have if included in the Google ad platform.

What do you think? Will we see more information spreading through Facebook ads, as opposed to commercial messages?

Three million Facebook users in Sweden - statistics and demographics

The number of Facebook users in Sweden have now passed the three million mark.

This number have been close for a while, already in the end of October this blog mentioned the 3-million users in Sweden.
However, since October the number of Swedish Facebook users has oscillated around three million users and regulary gone back below the three million mark. But now it seems to be stable above.

Since I had a closer look at the statistics and demographics of Facebook users in Sweden when the number passed the one-million mark and the two-million mark I will once again drill down in the numbers. Enjoy.

The growth
The first million users in Sweden was reached in November 2007, the second million of users was reached in March 2009. Now, end of 2009, the third million users are reached in Sweden.

Based on the graph of the number of Facebook users in Sweden it doesn't look like the trend is flattening yet. Will the growth continue, or is the user base saturated?

When you look at the number of users per age you get the following distribution:

Most users are between 14 and 24 years old.

The genders
The Facebook users in Sweden is evenly distributed between male and female users: In all age groups there's a small surplus of female users (except for the 65+ group; perhaps male persons are more likely to fake their age?) The penetration
The current number of Facebook users in Sweden means that one third (33%) of the population are using Facebook. Out of the age group 15-64 years old nearly half of the population (47%) are on Facebook. In the group of people between 15 and 39 years old three out of four (73%) are on Facebook.

When you look at the penetration for each age you get this graph: Note that the 19-years-old have more than 100% penetration. Obviously there's some errors here (I discuss a few possible reasons in the end note).

It is also interesting to note that the reach is close to 10% even among the older part of the population. I'd say that there's plenty of room to grow towards four million users - as we have a notable part of all ages on Facebook it might continue to grow.

Compared with the one-million and two-million mark...
When you compare the age group penetration today with the previous distribution it is obvious that Facebook has got a foothold among the people above 35 years of age, and that this is where there has been a growth in the number of users. Note also that the highest penetration is in the age group of 15-19, which is a change from earlier this year. Facebook is no longer a place only for people in the early twenties, but a place where you'll find individuals of all ages.

Notes:
Are these numbers correct? What is meant by a Facebook user - someone with an account, or someone with an active account?

The numbers in this analysis is from the Facebook ad system and the Swedish demographics is from SCB.

There is definately some errors involved, but as an indication of the penetration and demographics these numbers might be used.

The age and gender is self-stated. Especially the age contains error sources. Eg. no doubt that the youngest Swedes, those below 13, also have found Facebook. (To a large degree this is probably driven by all the social games (eg Farmville) that can be played on Facebook.) But since the minimum age in order to register a Facebook account is 13 there is a number of kids who have stated an age of 13 or above. And the birth year can not be changed for an account, so this error might still be in place even when the user have passed the age of 13.

"Facebook Ads uses IP address and a user's profile information to determine a user's location." - it is not exactly clear how Facebook uses this combination to determine which users are Swedish. You might very well have individuals logging in through a Swedish IP, but who are not "part of the Swedish population".'

Further more, Facebook has the information of exact birth date, and the SCB numbers is an estimate of the age distribution for the year, not at the current date specifically. Thus the mapping of age information towards the Swedish demography from SCB have some errors.

Active users or not? - This is not clear, but my educated guess is that Facebook lists accounts which have been accessed in the last 30 days in the ads utility, thus the answer to this question is probably "Yes, active users".

CBO & CCO: Brands, Culture and a book

CBOs and CCOs, interesting development!

Ericsson now has an appointed Chief Brand Officer. Read more at this blog, or have look at the Wikipedia article on the topic. Not the first one in the world, but a fairly new corporate title.

So, what's next? I just saw that there's a new book coming - "Chief Culture Officer"

With the subtitle "How to create a living, breathing, corporation" it looks interesting. Have a look at the table of contents, the pages available as preview and the reviews so far.

I will definately add this to my list of books to potentially get and read.

It is also interesting to notice that not only is it released on Kindle first, it is also more expensive to buy the Kindle version. Are we seeing willingness to pay a premium price for non-paper versions of books?

(D&D; Disclosure and Disclaimer: I work for Ericsson in my daily profession. However I do not blog on behalf of Ericsson; all opinions expressed here are my personal views)

Phone as PVR - learn from the kids

The industry is pushing the TV experience out to the phones, and in general there is an interest in this use case. However, the next generation consumers are already defining how they will embrace TV and moving images on the phone.


I found my son watching the Simpsons, and at the same time recording it for later viewing. On his mobile phone.
As his phone usage budget is low, he and his friends doesn't use the mobile network that much. Yes - some phone calls and SMS's, but not connecting to the Internet. Mostly using the phone as a gaming platform, and also for various media consumption and creation.


In this case he uses the phone as a PVR, instead of a VCR or other more stationary solutions. By capturing the Simpsons episode the "analogue"way he solves the hazzle of later transfering the file to the phone. And he will be able to enjoy past episodes whenever and wherever he likes.


Oh yes, a bit cumbersome perhaps. But it definately solve the needs of my son. And with a 4 GB memory on he phone he can store a lot of shows...


The quality? Surprisingly good I'd say. And as long as he can keep his sieblings and parents quiet and out of the way the audio is acceptable also.

So - keep an eye on the kids, they define the future. Now.


What are your kids up to? Any stories to share?

Nokia and some "swiss army knife" applications for phones

More and more functionality is moving into mobile phones. You make calls, SMS and browse the web. Phones are also your MP3 player and your camera. Not to forget your address book and your calendar. You name it...

I just noticed another functionality from Nokia Betalabs. Phones as your magnifying glass. Perhaps an obvious application, but I haven't heard of it before. Simple and potentially useful. When the cameras gets better and better, as well as the screens, this is yet another addition to the swiss-army-knife set of functionality. Have a look at the video:



When I browsed through the Nokia Accessability site I also noticed the text-to-speech (TTS) application. Neat.

The obvious (?) combination of these two applications would be to have the phone reading out text you view through the phone's camera. Just add a bit of OCR. Shouldn't take long before this application appears, or is it already available somewhere?

Two million Facebook users in Sweden - here's the demographics

Sweden now has over two million Facebook users. That's a lot.

(Update December 2009 - now more than three million users, read more here)

It took Sweden around 16 months to go from one million users to two million users. This means that the overall penetration of Facebook currently is 22% in Sweden.
As you can see from the chart below the growth rate started to increase in August last year, and doesn't seem to decline yet.

Just a week before Sweden broke the one million mark that I looked into the demographics of the Swedish Facebook users. So - let's have another look at the demographics and see what have changed.

Age of Swedish facebook users
This is the age distribution from Facebook:

If you combine this with the population in Sweden for each age group you get a similiar curve indicating the relative number of users within each age span:

You can notice a very high penetration (over 80%) among the population between 19 and 24.

From the chart below you can see that the media age is around 25 years, you find the first 25% of the users below 20 years of age and 75% of the users below 32 years of age:


Gender of Swedish Facebook users
When we look at the gender distribution we see that there is more women than men on Facebook in Sweden:

The female users are in majority across all age groups:


Also, when you compare the similiar graph from 2007 you notice that the "undefined" gender group has gone down. I believe Facebook no longer allow the users not to state gender?

And while we are comparing with the numbers from 2007, let's have a look at the penetration per age group side by side:

You can note that the population age 35 and over still has room for growth, but percentage wise has grown more than the 20-24 age group since 2007.

That's enough of graphs for now. Let's wait for the 3 millionth user in Sweden for some more graphs...

As a last note - when Facebook hit one million users in Sweden I noted that Facebook was the second most visited site in Sweden according to Alexa. Now, when the number of Swedish users has doubled the same Alexa lookup only put Facebook as number 5:

Twixdagen and some Twitter videos

It seems like the microblogging site Twitter has started to get some momentum in Sweden. Still not a mainstream usage, it will be interesting how far microblogging will spread in Sweden.

Twixdagen
In Sweden most political parties, and quite a few individual politicians, have started to use Twitter. No doubt they are influenced by Barrack Obama's Twitter account.

In the overall mashup tradition a site, Twixdagen.se, has created a feed of all Tweets from Swedish parties and politicians. I find this rather neat and interesting, as it definately increases the visibility and transparancy of the daily work inside politics (disclaimer - I haven't valued the quality and information value of the resulting strean ;-).

Twitter videos
Also recently, two videos with Evan Williams has surfaced.

The first video is from TED. Evan tells the story behind Twitter. I kind of like the statement "I learned to kind of follow hunches, even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're gonna go". Also, what takes place after Evans talk is a great example of the backchannel concept.


The second video is from the television show Charlie Rose. (The Twitter part starts a approx. 33 min 40 sec.)

So, what are you waiting for? If you are not on Twitter, join today. You'll find me at twitter.com/johan.