New Legal Legislation: When You Renew Your Drivers License You Are Issued a Facebook Account
Published by Rodney Rumford December 18th, 2008 in Facebook, Facebook News.New Legal Legislation: When You Get Your Drivers License You Are Issued a Facebook Account: This is a bit of a tongue in cheek joke aimed at this just released statistic from facebook. The fastest growing demographic on facebook is those users 25 years old and older.
The reason for this post is to bring to light the fact that facebook is growing at an unprecedented new number of users daily. MY buddy Justin Smith over at InsideFacebook has reported that facebook is adding ~ 600,000 new users a day. Think about that number; it is mind numbing. Facebook is truly on a path to map the entire worlds social graph and connections.
So what does this mean? It means that facebook is laying the solid and ever growing foundation for connectivity of personal relationships and how people communicate, share and discover more content with more friends. The value of these connections is determined by how they are used. Engagement on facebook continues to grow and this means that people are becoming dependent on it as a communication form. Communication forms do not typically disappear; rather they evolve. As Metcalfe’s law kicks into overdrive; facebook becomes even more valued (and not just by advertisers, marketers and investors).
If you and your business are not on facebook; it is well past time to rethink you position. Brand marketers go to where the audience is at; and it is increasingly on facebook. Facebook is not going away, nor is facebook a fad.
Some Stats According to facebook:
* More than 140 million active users
* More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
* The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
* Average user has 100 friends on the site
* 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
* More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
* More than 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
* More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
* More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
* More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
* More than 2 million events created each month
* More than 19 million active user groups exist on the site
Kind of makes you wonder why their SocialAds network is a big bomb that returns nothing on your investment doesn’t it? Think about it. It’s obvious why these ads don’t work in terms of furthering commercial interests. Clearly there’s more to it than numbers of potential eyeballs.
Linda M. Lopeke
The SMARTSTART Coach
Love the headline, Rodney! It definitely got me to click through to this post, which incidentally, I did from Twitter. Would be interesting to see if Facebook shows up as one of your top referrers, given the staggering statistics you listed.
But as someone who was once dependent on Facebook as a social platform and now barely logs on, I’m curious if they have any retention data. New sign ups by the hundreds of thousands seems to indicate explosive growth, but how many are active users, and how many hundreds of thousands have dropped off prior to the 600,000 influx?
The key with any social network is sustainability, and one of the big reasons that Twitter has maintained such an active user base (and growing all the time) despite the boatload of technical and functionality issues is that it captivates a dynamic community of users engaging in real time, something which Facebook [currently] lacks.
I agree that Facebook isn’t going away, and I think that it has its place but am not convinced it is a viable business platform — especially as users become more desensitized to ads, and the whole social ad debacle does not bode well for instilling trust and authenticity. In addition, groups and fan pages are becoming increasingly static with little interactivity, serving more as placeholders for usernames than active conversations between motivated individuals.
That said, any network with as large a population as Facebook has tremendous potential for business and collaboration, but I think in order to achieve that, more focus should be spent on fostering relevancy vs. touting numbers that have no meaning without a feasible, actionable — and beneficial — context.
Thanks for the post Rumford - Facebook is nuts! It’s growth is kinda interesting to watch, because the bigger it gets, the further away sustainable profits seem to get as Gennefer commented above,… it almost seems like economies of scale don’t apply.
If anyone’s interested in reading about the infrastructure it takes to support this sort of growth, I did a post on it recently - http://marketingisadirtyword.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/amazing-facebook-statistics/
Oh Gen,
How we think alike. I agree with your comments wholeheartedly. Facebook has some major challenges, but is becoming a behemoth quickly.