A new ‘country’ is formed!

I was doing a some research for a client I am working with on Social Networking and its impact on business. I came across an amazing statistic which I thought I would share. According to the Facebook Blog there are now over 350m active users on Facebook in December 2009. If it were a country, it would make it the third largest in the world after China which has 1.4bn people and India which has 1.2bn. If we think of this new community as a coherent entity we can start to undertake segmentation etc. as we could do with a countries population.

The ethnic mix has also been identified in the US and in the last year this has started to mirror the general US population. Although this is good for Facebook it will raise potential challenges for Governments around the world as it allows for interests groups to quickly and efficiently find like minded people and establish communications.

A second interesting fact is that Facebook looks at happiness – entitles United States Gross National Happiness factor. This index tracks the happiness of Facebook users around the world and unsuprisingly Christmas and Thanksgiving are high on the list. It would be interesting to see what if there are comparable peaks for the UK and other countries.

These are interesting metrics and it would be fascinating to look for correlations in mail volumes around the world against these figures – if so this could provide a further factor to stitch into econometric modelling.

For many services such as Facebook and Twitter are not considered to be serious factors when considering forecasting, however the size and unfluence of these social networks make them a potentially significant metric which we should take seriously.

The second factor when looking at these social networking services is to view them as a market. These are significant global populations and as such can be segmented and addressed as any other demographic group.