What Everyone Wants to Know: Who is the Average Facebook User?
May 15, 2013
To many users, Facebook may be seen as simply a social networking site with the occasionally annoying targeted ads. However, the marketing and advertising potential is nothing short of fulfilled. The Daily Dot offers a look at the results of mathematician Stephen Wolfram’s Personal Analytics for Facebook — an important step in the direction of the actualization of marketing potential. We were not surprised to see that “This is the Average Facebook User’s Life According to Big Data” seems at least a little creepy.
Wolfram found that people have, on average, about 342 Facebook friends. This number peaks for people in their late teenage years and then declines. What we found most interesting is that Wolfram compared his data on relationship statuses with those collected by the United States census and the two datasets were almost identical.
The article shares more on how and why this information was collected:
“Wolfram gathered this data from more than one million Facebook subscribers who signed up for Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook, a tool that takes a person’s facts on the social network to create personalized reports. He then parsed this information to create a series of very revelatory graphs. ‘I’ve always been interested in people and the trajectories of their lives,’ Wolfram writes. ‘But I’ve never been able to combine that with my interest in science. Until now.’”
Marketers and Facebook users alike are intrigued by what the characteristics the average Facebook user has. It comes at little surprise that people voluntarily signed up to participate and that the interest to collect this kind of information has materialized.
Megan Feil, May 15, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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