Are Restaurants prepared to take Advantage of the Marketing Opportunities that Facebook offers?

January 4th, 2010 · No Comments

Active Facebook Users By Country & Region: August 2009

Link to the whole slideshare presentation (Source-O’Reilly Media)

http://www.slideshare.net/oreillymedia/active-facebook-users-by-country-region-august-2009

Source:

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Statistics
Company Figures

* More than 350 million active users
* 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
* More than 35 million users update their status each day
* More than 55 million status updates posted each day
* More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
* More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
* More than 3.5 million events created each month
* More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
* More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
* Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Average User Figures

* Average user has 130 friends on the site
* Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
* Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
* Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
* Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
* Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
* Average user is invited to 3 events per month
* Average user is a member of 12 groups

International Growth

* More than 70 translations available on the site
* About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
* Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Platform

* More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
* Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
* More than 500,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
* More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users
* More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
* More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month
* Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect

Mobile

* There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
* People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
* There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Active Users growth in US.

Today it is exactly one year when I first wrote a blog post about Facebook Marketing. It has been a great blogging journey and I’m enjoying the process. It’s a great feeling just to flash back and see how far I’ve come in my learning process.

When I went through some of my blog post that I had written a year ago to compare the statistics, I realized how fast Facebook has grown in just one year in front of my eyes. It’s an incredible experience to see how Facebook has transformed especially in the year 2009.

The first thing that is astounding is the growth rate of Facebook in US.It has almost tripled the total number of Facebook users in US. When I checked the stats last year, the total number of users were a little over 36 million.

Look at the above graph by O’Reilly Media, it indicates that the total number of the Facebook users on August of 2009, was 8o million. Today when I checked on Facebook, found out that it has about little over 100 million users in US. So just between August and December of 2009 in four months Facebook has added 20 million users.In one year in 2009 alone Facebook has added over 64 million users. That is huge growth. I predict this will keep growing in the the years ahead not just in States but worldwide.

Do you think your customers are not on Facebook?

Most of your customers are already on Facebook. Ask some of your current customers who frequent your restaurant and you will find out the answer. If not all of your customers are on Facebook right now, they will soon be joining in the future. Hope the graph of users growth trend give you an idea where Facebook is heading.

When we think about social networking site like Facebook, we generally have a perception that it is only for high school kids and not for adults. Well, that might be true in the beginning when Facebook just started, limited only to colleges and high schools. But today as it has grown beyond that age limit of high school kids. In fact the fastest growing segment on Facebook are the parents of those kids. It is said that mums and dads have out numbered the high school kids. You can see on the above research slide that shows the strongest growth is in 45+ age group.

These mums and dads have the purchasing power and are the decision makers. So don’t you think it would be smart idea to connect with them on Facebook and attract them to your business. I see a lot of potential customers for your restaurant readily available on Facebook. Now your job as a smart restaurant business owner is to first locate them and attract them into your restaurant via Fan Page.

With all these benefits of being able to market your restaurant at a very low cost and with laser target precision, it would be a mistake not to integrate Facebook Marketing if your restaurant wants to thrive in this new age of Social Media.

After looking at all those statistics and growth trends of Facebook, What do you think about using Facebook for your restaurant marketing? Do you believe Facebook will grow even faster next year? Are restaurants prepared to take advantage of the marketing opportunities that Facebook offers?

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