Facebook Demographics

Five important points about the demographics of Facebook are:
1) There are more females on Facebook
2) A majority of Facebook users are 18-24
3) College students are the largest users, but many of the users' school status is unknown
4)There are more liberals using Facebook, but that data was no longer collected after October 2007
5) From 2007 to 2009, the unknowns of gender and age has lessened. About 98% of Facebook users' age and gender is known.

Knowing if one gender uses a social media more than the other is important to know because you can better target consumers with products that pertain to their gender. Knowing a majority of users are ages 18-24 and the second largest age group is 25-34 is also important. That means most of the users are in college or freshly graduated. This group is more mature, interested in technology, drink alcohol, etc. Advertisements are different for this age range. Also, Facebook having more knowledge of age and gender for a majority of their users is a great way to target advertising. Knowing specific age and gender will allow advertiser to send specific advertisements. For example: a female that is 25 years old can be targeted with Coach purse advertisements. Obviously advertising to a female that is 16 years old would be fruitless for Coach, because most 18 year old females could not afford a Coach purse. It would also not be resourceful to advertise to a male for a Coach purse because they are not the target audience.

In October 2007, a majority of users identified themself as liberals. Though, knowing users' political ideology is not the important information. The importance of this is after October 2007, that information was removed from the data. Maybe knowing users political stance does not have great impact on product use. On the other hand, knowing peoples' political stance helps figure out how to advertise social issues, such as promoting environmental issues.

Finally, most of Facebook user's are college students, but 57.6% of Facebook users education status is unknown. This large chunk of unknown users makes it hard to target consumers. People with college education tend to be reached in different form than people with only high school or less education. It is well known that educated people read more, and the reading materials educated people read is different than uneducated people. For Facebook, this issue of unknown education status may not be that important since most of the advertising is material things, but future advertisement adventures could be hurt by this.

At the bottom line, knowing the demographics and the changes within the demographics will influence how and who advertises on Facebook.