Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business

Chapter 16. Does Facebook Matter? (To Marketers?)

Facebook has tapped into a real interest and desire to connect, something to which teens and twenty-something young adults in particular readily respond. Founded at Harvard in 2004 exclusively for college students (a requirement it dropped in late 2006), Facebook had almost eight million members just three years later, fueled solely by word of mouse.

Facebook is such a fast-moving phenomenon that it's hard to say exactly how big it is. David Wilkins, senior director of content strategy at the social networking solutions firm Mzinga, writes that in "an analysis of the most recent Facebook advertising data, over 50 percent of the 20- to 30-year-olds in the U.S. have Facebook accounts (based on a comparison of Facebook's ad data and U.S. Census Bureau numbers.)"^[83] Yes, more than half of all Americans in the 20–30 age group.

Of course, not everyone who has a Facebook account will be an active user. One source (www.allfacebook.com) said in June 2008 that the site had more than 70 million total users. Another (www.trendrr.com) found the number of daily users in late June ranging from around 250,000 to 315,000 (perhaps because school was out?).

While both sources may be correct and looking at different parts of the elephant, a blogger named Paul Francis went to the trouble of gathering Facebook user data via an advertiser tool that facilitates audience targeting. In November 2007, he pulled user numbers for the top countries, broken down ...