Facebook Promotes Diverse Userbase With Demographic Study
For the first time ever, Facebook has shared some of the demographic data related to its more than 350 million users. Actually, they just shared the demographics for Facebook’s US users, but that’s still a sizable number. So, what were their findings? Unsurprisingly, the racial makeup of Facebook is pretty similar to the general racial makeup of the web. While it generally skews white, Facebook US users are also made up a substantial portion of African-Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics.
Anyone care to guess why Facebook would go through this complex undertaking? If you said for advertisers, you’re right! As Larry Dignan smartly observes at ZDNet, “The future of Facebook’s business model revolves around social advertising, but the treasure trove of data from its users may be the most valuable asset here. An advertiser looking at Facebook is bound to wonder about ethnic targeting and consider the company a player.”
The main reason Facebook has been opening itself up lately (despite angry protests from users) is to increase its significant potential as a marketing tool. If the company can offer compelling proof of its diverse userbase, they will be more likely to attract niche advertisers.
Check below for Facebook blurb on the study along with a couple of nifty graphs.
In order to make Facebook as open and connected as possible for everyone, one of our goals is to understand how different populations of users join and use the service. With that objective in mind, the Facebook Data team recently sought to answer the question, “How diverse are the ethnic backgrounds of the people using Facebook?” This is a tough question to answer because, unlike information such as gender or age, Facebook does not ask users to share their ethnicity or race on their profiles. In order to answer it, we focused on a single country with a large and diverse population—the United States. Comparing people’s surnames on Facebook with data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, we are able to estimate the racial breakdown of Facebook users over the history of the site.
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