Facebook’s Audience and Advertising: Very Few to Target?
Posted by Bob Warfield on November 12, 2007
After reading Fred Wilson’s post, I had to go play with Facebook advertising myself. What caught my eye is the ability to see how many people they think an ad would target from their audience based on the factors you type in. Here are some of the things I learned playing with this:
– Total audience: 21,371,920
– Over 18 years old: 17,291,140
– In college: 4,595,080
– College grads: 5,836,520
– Interested in Music: 15,520
– Interested in Beer: 35,240
– Interested in Sailing: 21,580
– Interested in Blogs: 2,800
– Interested in Cars: 97,000
My problem is how rapidly the numbers go down as you try to target with specific keywords. I would have thought some of thees things, for example “Music” or “Beer”, would land a lot of hits. Instead, the numbers re extremely low.
Either there is something wrong here, or the much vaunted ability to precisely target “Smart Ads” to the audiences is way overrated for Facebook. Try it yourself and let me know if you can get a better result. You must have a Facebook account, but at the bottom of your profile page there is a link called “Advertising” that makes it very easy. Give it a web URL and the next page will let you play these targeting games.
The Emperor had better find his New Clothes soon!
Related Articles
AssetBar, makers of popular Facebook applet BoozeMail, say the problem is that Facebook is a dating site, not a business site.
Massive overlap in Social Networks. There seems to be the business cluster consisting of LinkedIn, Plaxo, Salesforce, and the like, and the college kids cluster, which is nearly all the other Social Networks. The question will be whether the others do a better job with the profile information than what I found here from Facebook.
Facebook: it’s all about the kids « Assetbar: drinks and recipes said
[…] Smoothspan posited that “beer” or “music” would have better numbers. But at 35,240 and 15,520 users, respectively, the results didn’t look so good either […]
assetbar said
Thanks for the link smoothspan, but we don’t write Boozemail. 🙂
Here are some more 18+ stats for you:
California: 1,534,540
New York 1,402,660
Texas: 1,058,240
Florida: 858,320
Michigan: 604,080
Arizona: 235,900
…
Wyoming: 20,940
I think it’s fair to say that FB is only “big” in english countries:
Canada: 6,692,540
UK: 6,984,820
Austrailia: 1,842,500
China: 116,300
France: 623,720
Germany: 322,580
India: 329,800 <– not hot
I didn’t get very good results targeting where people work:
Microsoft: 200
Google: 100
GE: 140
Dell: <20
Slide: <20
Apple: 40
ATT <20
But the armed services seems to be big users:
Army: 40,580
USAF: 8,460
Navy: 7,540
Marines: 3,520
I have a new post that shows some interesting age stats. No big surprise, but Facebook users are mostly kids…
-Israel
Facebook advertising - how valuable is it really? at diversity.net.nz said
[…] or otherwise of Facebook’s social advertising service. Commentators have passed judgement here, here and here among other […]
MySpace for Sharing and Expression, Facebook for Networking? « SmoothSpan Blog said
[…] up? How influential are they? Can I get a hot date (for those who subscribe to the idea that Facebook is largely about college dating). The opportunities for expression on Facebook seem dramatically more limited. Perhaps […]