Who Follows SLVNews on Facebook?

Demographics of SLVNews Facebook Followers 

For public (not personal) pages, Facebook provides a lot of data to the page administrators through a product they call "Insights".  Everyone can see how many "Likes" a page has but there are a bunch of other statistics provided including things like the number of people who see a given post, where people live, and the ages and genders of the people who like your page that can accessed by page admins.

SLVNews owes much of it's growth to our presence on Facebook and I've always been interested in the demographics of our followers there.  The above chart is a snapshot of current SLVNews Facebook followers as of last week.

(Despite a recent revelation that over the last few months they may have misstated the actual information due to an oversight in how they were capturing data, the numbers they provide are useful particularly in measuring growth and demographics of a followers of public pages.

For some perspective, in the US, Facebook has about 52% of the total population and 71% of internet users.  Facebook estimates there are about 13,000 users in the SLV area and SLVNews has about 1700 followers.

The SLVNews audience differs in some interesting ways compared with the total US Facebook following.  First, although it doesn't show in this chart our users are predominantly local - over 98% list a Santa Cruz County hometown. Facebook has a worldwide audience and among the most popular pages it's not unusual for over 50% of the likes to come from outside of the US. Second, as is clear in the chart above, on SLVNews, women outnumber men by better than 2-1.  Overall more women use Facebook and all social media.  Nationally the split is 55% female to 45% male on Facebook.  At SLVNews it's almost 70% to 30%.   Finally, the age distribution among Facebook users nationally skews younger than our audience.  39% of Facebook users in the US are under 24 while only 16% of the SLVNews likes come from that age group. 37% of Facebook users nationally are 35 or older while at SLVNews they represent 64% of our total audience.

Our audience on Facebook has always trended older than the average but as we grow we are finding the disparity lessen. The 45-54 age group was once our largest and now it's the 35-44 cohort but I'm proud of the fact that among followers 65 and older we now have almost 100.

If you find any of this interesting and want to see how all of the various social media platforms compare check out this link:  http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-demographics-in-2012/