Answering some Facebook questions

When talking to clients about leveraging social networking, specifically Facebook, two questions are predominant:

1. There is a lot of hype about Facebook, but really how many people are using it in Canada?

2. What are other companies doing on Facebook, am I being left behind?

Here are some stats, and a quick but not exhaustive survey, to help answer those questions.

Facebook is Huge in Canada.

Facebook reports that it has over 7 million active Canadian users, which is approximately 20% of the entire Canadian population. This makes it second only to the U.S. in total number of users, but with Canada being about 10% of the size of the U.S. , Canadians really have embraced Facebook in a much bigger way. As for cities, Toronto has the largest representation of any city, with over half a million users.

Furthermore, the bulk of those 7 million Canadian Facebook users are likely in the 15-39 age range. In Canada 15 – 39 year olds account for roughly 34% of the population (2006 Census). Though not an exact calculation, these numbers suggest that over half of Canada’s 15-39 year olds actively use Facebook!

What some companies are doing:

Company /Brand: PlayStation Canada

Facebook Presence: Sponsored Group

Reach: ~28,000 members

Focus:

The main focus of the PlayStation Canada group has been creating awareness of limited addition offerings and new games, and running contests. Contests have used Facebook as platform for contest entry, for example one contest asked entrants to “Show us where you play” by posting pictures in the Photo section of PlayStations Facebook group.

For members, this group page has also become a resource for them to get answers to specific questions about games, system set-up, and product availability. Furthermore, most answers come from other group members, rather than from Sony Canada – a true community.

Company/Brand : CBC

Facebook Presence:

Sponsored Group - The Great Canadian Wish List

Pages - CBC, CBC News

Application - CBC Radio 3 Player

Reach:

Group - ~14,000

Pages – 545, and 370 fans respectively

Application – Loaded to ~2100 accounts, 42 daily active users

Focus:

There has not been much overall focus to CBC’s activities on Facebook.

Though there are CBC and CBC News pages, they are not highly used by CBC or users. The CBC news page does attempt to drive traffic to news stories at cbc.ca with a tool bar showing latest stories.

The Great Canadian Wish list has been the most successful. This program used Facebook as a platform for users to communicate their wishes and get support for them. Through custom forms in Facebook, users could categorize their wish, provide details, upload photos, and send to friends for support.

The CBC Radio 3 application allows users to add a playlist to their profile, and allow their friends to listen to that playlist within Facebook. Though a cool idea, there are other applications such as My Music that provides a better application to share music on Facebook, so this has not really taken off.

Company/Brand: Molson Canadian

Facebook Presence: Sponsored Group

Reach: ~17,000 members

Focus:

Mostly Molson Canadian uses the sponsored page to drive users to existing online content at molsoncanadian.ca. It also uses the page to raise awareness of contests and sponsored events, and to support its brand positioning with video content directly available on the sponsored page. However, so far Molson Canadian has not used Facebook as a platform for contests or other direct engagement. Furthermore, discussion by members is limited.

Other Company/Brands:

Apple Students: Sponsored Group ~440,000 members

Pink Victoria’s Secret: Sponsored Group ~350,000 members

Red Bull U: Sponsored Group ~22,000 members

Red Bull: “Red Bull Roshambull” Application (a rock, paper, scissors game) ~2,000 daily active users

Want More Stats?

Check out the recent CMA post on Facebook Stats.