Thinking about some Facebook usage statistics

I spend most of my working life researching how collaborative technologies – particularly social media – are impacting business strategy. My academic background is in economics. So when The Economist does a special report on something like social networking, it always gets my attention. And as with most articles in the publication, I always find a treasure trove of interesting statements and facts to think about. Over the next little while, I’m going to be exploring a few of them here.

Today I’m going to start with something very, very simple – the statistics they provided on Facebook usage in their lead article. Specifically, each of the following three stats were presented in relation to Facebook becoming so popular:

• 350 million users
• 55 million updates a day
• 3.5 billion pieces of content shared each week

Each is unquestionably a big number, that seems to indicate popularity – but a simple calculation of per-user stats seems to be telling me a slightly different story. For example, 55 million updates a day, across 350 million users, works out to just over one update per week, per user. That doesn’t actually seem like very many – particularly given that, at least from what I have seen, there is a reasonable number of people that update their status quite regularly. Spun a different way, if 15% of people were providing one update per day, that would leave 85% never providing an update at all. I’m not exactly sure how the exact distribution plays out, but in general it appears that providing an “update” on Facebook isn’t something most Facebook users do that often – and certainly less than once a week.

I also find it interesting to contrast the 55 million daily “updates” with the 3.5 billion weekly – or 500 million daily,  just under 1.5 per user – pieces of content shared. So for every update people opt to provide to their network, about 10 other pieces of content are shared. When you think about Facebook as a place where people share with their network who they are (and what they’re thinking), that means personal identity can be defined far more by the types of content being posted then quick little statements.

I’d really like to see a breakdown of what exactly this content is (are such numbers floating out there somewhere?). My initial hunch is that photographs account for a significant chunk of this, but there’s obviously also a lot of news links, videos, events, etc. But again, a VERY unscientific study (basically scanning the recent activity of my own friends) seems to indicate that, unsurprisingly, this activity is very skewed. I’m assuming that, for example, the 52 photos my friend just posted counts as 52 pieces of content… and I notice a handful of people seem to post multiple things daily, while a huge chunk are relatively inactive.

Which all takes me back to one of the research themes I’ve been exploring for awhile. When it comes to social media, a lot of attention is paid to the active people that create a lot of content – and share a lot of information. And since so much attention is paid to them, many social media strategies (often inadvertently) have an underlying assumption that everyone is like that. A lot less attention tends to be paid to the legions of people that are, more or less, relatively passive members of various social networks – perhaps absorbing some of the information from others, but doing little else. The reason I think this is important is that I’ve often heard customers are no longer passively absorbing information, thus the broadcast media model is dead – but the behavior of many people on social networks indicates the reports of death might be premature. Instead, they might just be listening to a different broadcaster, which is a very different story.

Tagged as: broadcasting, business strategy, facebook, social media, statistics