02-Nov-2010

Awesome Facebook Statistical Facts

Here are fundamental facts that make Facebook such an inviting and compelling platform for promoting business activities:

  • Facebook yields the most loyal visitors.
  • There are 6,845,609,960 humans.
  • There are 1,966,514,816 Internet users.
  • There are 517,760,460 Facebook users.
  • In March/2010, Facebook traffic overtook that of Google in the U.S.[1]
  • About 70% of Facebook users are outside the U.S.

Information obtained from various sources including Facebook and USA Today.

No matter how you view the numbers and no matter your skepticism asking if all those accounts represent unique individuals (Facebook has a policy of a single account for each individual), the numbers are huge. Links between friends grow exponentially. e.g. 10 people friends to each and all yield 45 pairs of friends; 100 people friends to each and all yield 4950 pairs of friends.

When I join a group, I am wishing for people to take notice of my personal Facebook profile and my website which I post to the group. If they view my personal Facebook profile, they will see that I have a This1That1Whatever.com Facebook fan page for my website. If they become a fan of my fan page, that activity is posted in the fan's profile where all his/her friends can see and likewise become a fan if they so please. By promoting my fan page through other means, such as posting comments on websites or suggesting my fan page to my friends or asking my friends to suggest my fan page to their friends, I am further able to gain visitors to my website.

If the previous paragraph is a little complicated, just remember:

  • Join Facebook groups that are related to the topic of your business.
  • Create a Facebook fan page for your business.
  • Build your friends list in your Facebook profile.
  • Suggest your Facebook fan page to your friends.

Another consideration arises from these awesome Facebook statistics. When building backlinks for your website, if you are limited to posting only one link in the comments on another website, should you link to your Facebook fan page or to your website?

If you link to your Facebook fan page, you will benefit from all of the above but forsake a backlink for search engine visibility. If you link to your website, you will miss out on the Facebook opportunities. My recommendation and personal strategy is to seek a balance of both. If the comment posting website is oriented towards Facebook e.g. it is talking about Facebook, then link back to your Facebook fan page; otherwise seek a balance by linking to your website.

See the Google, Yahoo, Facebook Revenue article for revenue growth comparison.

[1] There are various online competitive intelligence services that track visitor traffic. Here is an Experian Hitwise chart showing Facebook traffic surpassed that of Google in March/2010. Here is a comScore chart showing the same happening in Oct/2010.

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