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".

Facebook statistics - an update

It has been a while since I last posted a updated statistics about Facebook usage, growth and penetration. But now it's time again.

If you have missed my earlier posts please have a look here for all posts on Facebook stats (including this post).

Please note - all tables and graphs might be missing if you are reading the feed of this blog. Please go to TheKillerAttitude.com to ensure you see everything.

This time I post a number of "top ten" lists to highlight some aspects. In the end I enclose a complete table, all countries, all statistics.

Recently there has been a number of posts around declining usage of Facebook in the US and UK, based on figures from eg. comScore and Nielsen Online. It might be partially because of a saturation among the users for Social Networking activities. Read the update in this post though, where Facebook states they are measuring active users, not unique visitors.

Also recently, Facebook launched a Spanish translation in the beginning of February. Will non-english versions help continue to drive the growth? Read on for an indication.

And finally, Facebook just added a few countries to the SocialAd utility. Brazil, Croatia, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Poland, Serbia and Taiwan was added. When I looked at the numbers last week these countries where represented, but did not have any data yet.

What do we measure?
But first, some thoughts on what numbers we are following.

I have been looking into the numbers provided by Facebook through the SocialAd utility. As the target group for these figures are potential advertisers I believe Facebook are keen to keep the numbers as accurate as big as possible but also as accurate as possible.

As indicated both in the post from ReadWriteWeb I mentioned above, and in Robert Scoble's interview with Marc Zuckerberg, Facebook seems to define a "active user" as someone who has signed in over the last 30 days. Thus I do believe the SocialAd numbers reflects "active users".

But then, in this post Michael Arrington quotes Matt Cohler (VP Facebook), stating that there's 600 000 active users in Germany. The number in SocialAd is 480 000 currently. Oh well...

I have also used the member count in some country networks. Not for all countries, see overall tabel at the end to find out which countries.

The "networks" are something each user selects to join or not. Thus not all users based in a country is expected to be part of the country network. Also, a user can join a different network than the home country.

On the other hand, I do believe the country as stated in the SocialAd utility is based on the country the user selects when signing up for Facebook.

We should also note that the "network" figure probably are not taking into account which users are considered active or not.

If you look at the growth week per week, and compare the growth in SocialAd's numbers and the networks, you see this:

The networks I have looked at (yellow bars) shows a growth every week. The SocialAds data (blue - all countries, red - only countries with "network" data) are more bumpy. Every second week or so you see a growth, in between you only see minor changes.

And last, when calculating benchmark figures I have used population data from the CIA factbook and data on internet usage from Internet World Stats.

Enough introduction, on to the stats.

Countries with highest usage
So, which country is "most Facebooked"?

Depends on how you define it, of course. We'll use the data from the Social Ad utility.
If you look at number of user you get this top ten list:

US in the top, no surprise.

If you on the other hand look at Facebook penetration per country population you get this top ten list:

US falls down to #8. Note that several Nordic countries are among the top ten.

If you however use the penetration among the internet users ina country as benchmark you see a few countries which might be unexpected:

Canada ranks high whatever metrics you use though.

Where's the growth?
It is always interesting to see where the growth is. Let's see the top ten list of growth rate since beginning of the year, using Social Ad data.

So there is still growth according to the numbers. But of course the highest growth potential is where the penetration is lower.

What if you look at the growth in absolute numbers?

Well, US and UK in the top. So this is where most users are added, according to SocialAds. Not the same message as in the articles referenced in the beginning of this blog post.

Translation matters?
Before we look at all countries in one table, what about the Spanish translation? Did it have any effect?

To give an answer I turn to the "networks" data. As seen in the graph above no significant changes in the SocialAds data can be seen the last few weeks, so we will probably not see the potential effect here. Let's have a look at the top ten networks with regards to growth rate. (Note that I have not looked at all networks, but it is an indication.)

Hm, what's the language in the countries on the top half of the list?
It will be interesting to follow how this evolves. For Spanish, and for other translations as they are introduced. Stay tuned for next update.

The big picture
And for you who would like to see all countries. Here is a table to look into.


(As the tables will not get indexed I add this: Facebook statistics, usage, penetration for Turkey Israel France Malaysia Singapore China Switzerland Colombia Italy Germany India Spain Ireland Netherlands Australia Saudi Arabia New Zealand Mexico Egypt Lebanon United Arab Emirates Pakistan Dominican Republic Japan Sweden South Korea, Republic of Korea United Kingdom Norway United States (US) South Africa Canada Philippines Indonesia Russian Federation (Russia) Greece Denmark Finland Chile Belgium Argentina Venezuela Austria Jordan Peru Kuwait Thailand Panama Brazil Croatia Hong Kong Nigeria Poland Serbia Taiwan )

Facebook profile - time to tidy up

Today Facebook enabled the profile clean up tool that was announced a few days ago.

When I visited my profile page a few minutes ago I was presented with this box:


So, let's start the year with a fresh Facebook profile page. I selected some applications I do not use frequently and went ahead.












Sure enough - now at the bottom of my profile I see this:


And when I expand it I see the applications (they are not expanded since I manually minimized them).

So - a way for people to keep the applications on their profiles, but ensure that the main profile page does not appear that cluttered. Definately needed with the abundance of Facebook apps that gets installed.


Now - it would be nice if the tool procatively proposed when and what to move to this extended profile. And no, I do not have a proposal for a guiding rule for when to propose what.

More facebook statistics

Time for some more Facebook statistics. You might remember my other posts on the topic?

This time we will look at several aspects:

• Did the Facebook growth continue to decline as I noticed last time?
  In my last post with Facebook statistics I noticed that the growth had declined, and actually turned into a decrease. What happened since then?
  
• New countries added to the set of data - what does the penetration league look like?
  To the initial list of 31 countries an additional 16 is added. Who's in the lead for largest Facebook penetration right now?
  
• But is the data for the new 16 countries complete?
  Hey, there seems to be something odd with the data for new countries added. What? Can you spot it?
  

(Note: If you don't see any tables below it is probably because you are reading this post via a feed reader. For some reason not all my embedded stuff seems to get through. If so, visit TheKillerAttitude.com to see the tables.)

Did the decline contine?
Have a look at the table below:

This is the growth rate each week for 31 countries (growth of number of users as found in the Social Ad utility).

The countries are ranked according to the overall growth since 1st of November. At the top Turkey has increased the number of users with almost 600%. At the bottom of the list you find Canada with a 10% increase.

The quite red column for Nov. 22nd was when I blogged about this last time. You see that the growth came back the two following weeks.

Dec. 13th is an all-nil column. Apparently the data was not updated at all. This was also the day I noticed the 16 new countries added (see below).

The Dec. 20th column is a very moderate growth week. Why? And compare the discussion on the new countries further down!

What is the usage penetration per country?
That is outlined in the table below. Country population figures are from the CIA factbook.
Note that Canada (with the lowest growth above) comes out on top.

Now, in this table you also find the 16 new countries for which the data is available (as no historic data was around the growth rate could not be calculated). The new countries are marked with yellow in the table.

Among the top ten on the list the only rank change is that Singapore overtook US (!) in penetration. Sweden is still at #4.

Is the data for the new countries complete?
Hm, well. Let us take in consideration the number of Facebook users that have registered in a national network. Next calculate the ratio between the number of people registered in the national network and the number of users in the country.

Below is a table with this ration for all the 16 new countries and some of the other. The list is sorted in descending order of this ratio.

See something strange?
All the new countries come out on the top, all with a ratio higher than 1 (100%).
Meaning that there is more people registered in the national network than user from the country. And this for all of the new countries.

I can't resist to quote Shakespear: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" (Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4), as Denmark is among these new countries.

Surely this indicates that the number of users for these 16 new countries are lower than the actual figure. Expect these to grow as Facebook fixes the data. We'll keep an eye on this!

Can this also explain the somewhat low overall growth the last week?

(As the tables will not get indexed I add this: Facebook statistics for
Turkey Israel France Malaysia Singapore China Switzerland Colombia Italy Germany India Spain Ireland Netherlands Australia Saudi Arabia New Zealand Mexico Egypt Lebanon United Arab Emirates Pakistan Dominican Republic Japan Sweden South Korea, Republic of Korea United Kingdom Norway United States (US) South Africa Canada Philippines Indonesia Russian Federation (Russia) Greece Denmark Finland Chile Belgium Argentina Venezuela Austria Jordan Peru Kuwait Thailand Panama)

Facebook "is" is gone

So - finally the is is gone from facebook status updates.

A minor thing perhaps, but some people have felt that the "is" implied some awquard grammar. And especially non-English status updates will benefit from the non-isish way.

Is Facebook growth declining?

I have been following the numbers available through Facebook's ad utility since it became available.

When I looked at the numbers last week (Thursday 22nd) I noticed that the number of users per country had decreased for most countries. Why?

The growth, sampled every week, is summarized in the table below (actual numbers available here).

Hm, why is this? Is the hype over? Or what does Facebook really measure?

Have people actually cancelled their Facebook accounts? Or does Facebook somehow measure active users (ie users who have logged in during the last x month). Has Facebook cleaned up the data, or is this a temporary glitch in the numbers?

It is also interesting to compare with Jeff Pulver's recent statistics, where he measures the growth the last month. The decrease is not visible here, as it occured the last week. Also, Jeff's numbers are from Sunday 25th, and seems to be slightly higher (number of users) for most countries.

No way to tell right now what the long term trend is, let's follow up over time. Also note that the numbers are only available for 31 countries, and the selection of these 31 is not clear.

Note that Alexa also shows a decrease in number of pageviews the last few days:

IKEA now has a Facebook page

Just saw that IKEA now have a Facebook page.

Last week I noticed an IKEA ad in my Facebook news feed, but couldn't find a Facebook page for IKEA.

Now it's here. Not much more yet, but it will be interesting to follow how IKEA uses this channel

Notice that the ad was in Swedish and apparently targeted at the Swedish audience. The Facebook page seem to be intented as an international page. Although Social Ads can be targeted to specific countries I wonder how the "fansumer" conversation will evolve.

Will it only draw English-speaking individuals, or will the conversation be a mixture of languages? Should IKEA set up separate pages for each country to secure a flow of comments in each language? How will Facebook target the multi-lingual scenario?

And it is not clear if it really was IKEA that set up this page. How does Facebook verify that a brand is claimed by a legitimate individual?

As I live close to IKEA in Barkaby, and visit IKEA now and then, I joined as a fan. Also to follow the evolution on how this channel is used. I was #14 to join.

(And yes, we have the bookshelf 'Billy' at home. I love it.)

IKEA goes SocialMedia

Today this showed up in my Facebook news feed:


Not a surprise that IKEA uses this channel, especially with the strong uptake of Facebook in Sweden.

SocialAd or not?

Is this a part of the SocialAds feature from Facebook? I don't think so. I can not find a Facebook Page for IKEA. So is this a SocialAd or another type of ad that is shown in the news feed?

I am not sure if I like this.

Ads are fine to me, but not when they clutter up the news feed. Keep them as banners around the screen. If I had a friend who is an IKEA fan, and this was part of a SocialAd, clearly indicating who was the fan of IKEA it might work, but I am not sure...

What is your view? Ads in the news feed - good or bad?

I and my blog qouted by mainstream media

Metro quoted me in relation to the Facebook uptake in Sweden. Metro even recommended this blog.

Is this good? I guess so, it is always nice when you get reactions to your blog. Of course for your ego, and also for the brands of this blog and myself. The online article have generated some traffic to this blog, but I still get the majority of the traffic from other sources.

I must say the actual quote might not be that valuable. "You can see yourself that it [Facebook usage] is growing. You find more and more people you know [in Facebook]. Facebook is the only site that is really broad right now. On other social networks you find considerable less people you know".

I also discussed the accuracy of the figures with Metro. This was not at all discussed in the article.

Two of the questions around this:

• The figures are probably based on registered users. This is fine, but does not say anything about the number of active users.


• These numbers are not available for all countries (see Jeff Pulver's post for a list of the countries). Why? Do the other countries have significant less users? Or are there other reasons for countries not to be included in the list?

Anyway, Facebook is widely used in Sweden. See my post on that Sweden passed 1 million users here and the post with detailed statistics from Sweden here.

And finally. I was a bit disappointed that the paper verion of the article was shorter and didn't mention me or this blog... That's life I guess, better luck next time.

Update 071109: Turns out that I was quoted in the paper version after all! Not in the "mainstream", green and daily edition, but is the purple, weekly, edition called 'Metro Teknik'.

Over one million Facebook users in Sweden

After my post last week with some details of the Facebook statistics in Sweden I noticed today that Sweden now has over one million Facebook users. At least according to the same source I used last time.
And if you look at Alexa you see that Facebook is number two among the most visited sites in Sweden.

So, it is not a surprise that Expressen, a major newspaper targeting the broad population, offers "share on Facebook" as an option for each article on the web.

Update 071107: Also Aftonbladet, the other "major tabloid newspaper" in Sweden, has a "show on Facebook" option for the articles. Thanks Bengt for mentioning this in a comment. I actually looked at this at Aftonbladet when writing the post, but apparently missed it.

Facebook statistics in Sweden

Update 071101: I have made a few corrections and clarifications of the post. I had put references to "November" in several places, where it should have been "October" (Guess I am ahead of my time?). Some other notes and corrections are also added, see more inline below.

As a follow up on my post around overall Facebook uptake I have done some digging around the Facebook penetration in Sweden.

I did one round of statistics collection end of last week, just when Jeff Pulver posted that Sweden was number four in overall Facebook penetration, and number two among all countries where English is not the primary language.

So, I can confirm the 9% penetration last week, and also state that today the penetration is 11% (close to 1 million users).

(Note: I use a slightly different figure for the Swedish population (9,169,673 compared with Jeff's 9,031,088. My figure is from a prognosis of the population by the end of 2007, which gave me the age and gender breakdown. The latest actual figure I found is from August 2007: 9,160,182. However these small variations does not affect the main findings.)

It is interesting to graph out the growth rate (I got the figure for Oct. 12th from this post):

Update: I initially stated that "The number of users have more than doubled in less than three weeks." Now I believe that the number for Oct. 12th is probably based on the number of people in the "Sweden network". This number for Oct. 31st is around 620k users. Still an impressing growth, but not "more than 100%".
I decided to keep the data point in the graph anyway.

Usage per age group

What is the demographics of the Swedish Facebook users? Let's map the penetration per age group:

As you can see the largest coverage is in the age span 20-24.

In the span 15-64 we see a 16% penetration, and between 15-39 we have 31% penetration. The usage is still very niche from my age and up...

I did the same breakdown for the data collected Oct. 25th - if we compare we see where the growth is last week:

Looks like a fairly even distributed growth per age group by visual inspection.

Usage per gender

Overall in Sweden we have more female users than male (396,700 vs. 320,820; or 9% vs. 7% penetration). However a large group of users (27%) have not defined their gender.

I have made a graph where I map gender distribution on the age groups:

You can note that the older you are, the less likely to state your gender you seem to be.

Final notes

There is probably some measurent errors in the numbers. However they should give a good indication of the current usage.

The metrics from Facebook is taken from the Facebook Flyers Pro utility. Nice of Facebook to reveal such statistics (and you can do other dataming as well)

It will be interesting to follow the evolution in Sweden.

(And once upon a time my dream was to work at Statistiska Centralbyrån :-)

Facebooked

I'm Facebooked. Just as many others are.

Facebook have gained an amazing number of user lately. Why? And why do I use Facebook?

I am amazed by the latest craze around Facebook. I have had a Facebook account for some time, but the last two month the number of people I know that is on Facebook has grown. It still a limited number of people that I have found, but I am amazed by the uptake in Sweden and in Europe in general as outlined here.

Further more, the valuation of Facebook is a hot topic. USD 15 billion according to the recent news that Microsoft invests $240 for 1.6% of Facebook.

Yes - Social Networking is hot. And Facebook is a rising star. If you look at the Alexa statistics you see that Facebook are now right behind MySpace on the ranking list. Further more - most of the sites on the top ten lists are "pure Social Mediaish", and behind eg Yahoo.com as the top domain you have both mash.yahoo.com and 360.yahoo.com (which was last week announced to "be transisted")

It is also interesting to compare the speed of which Facebook climbed to this position with MySpace rank history:

One last graph of interest, this time comparing the number of page views of both Facebook and MySpace with Google. Notice that MySpace is declining compared with Google.

I have a few more reflectations around Facebook. But rather than to put all into one post I will post a some more over time. Next planned topic is Facebook usage in Sweden, stay tuned.

And if you also are Facebooked, feel free to add me as friend. My profile is here.

(And thanks Alexa for the graphs, which I am free to use if I understand this statement correct)