As use of online social networks continues to grow worldwide, one of the most important questions to ask is how the user profile of different sites differs – to give an indication as to whether the type of consumers you want to engage with are actually spending time there in significant numbers. In particular, fundraisers tend to be watching for growth in older user groups (at least 45+) as these tend to best match with their traditional supporter profile.
With this in mind, I spotted a handy application today that helps answer this question, at least for Facebook users – and with over 150m active users worldwide that’s often the first site considered by marketers and fundraisers. It comes from the ‘unofficial Facebook blog’ AllFacebook and is aptly named Facebook Demographic Statistics.
You simply choose the country and the age group, or groups, you’re interested in (you can compare up to 3) and the site creates a chart showing the number of active Facebook users fitting the chosen profile each day over the last month.
The chart above shows the growth in UK active users in the 60-65 and 55-59 age groups. Perhaps not age profiles typically associated with online social networking, but both apparently showing sustained growth to 157,280 and 187,705 active users respectively by 25th January this year. That’s relatively small beer compared to the 750,199 aged 45-54 and the 2,029,595 aged 35-44 – and certainly to the 6,022,786 aged 18-25. However, it does still show that Facebook is gradually attracting an increasingly mature audience.
Another application offered by AllFacebook that you might be interested in ranks the performance of Facebook Pages – which let users become ‘fans’ of their favourite brands, celebrities, places, or whatever. Facebook Pages have become an important component of social media activity for many commercial and nonprofit brands but until now it hasn’t been possible to easily compare how well your Page is performing. Now you can use the AllFacebook Pages Statistics function to see a ranking of Pages by sector (including nonprofit) number of fans and growth rate.
Top of the nonprofit pages at the moment are The Red Ribbon Army and NPR.
Barack Obama, understandably, tops the Pages polls overall, with 4,641,291 fans. While Coca-Cola comes second with 2,315,954 fans – meaning that Obama is twice as popular as Coke (and better for you too!-)
