Ireland Facebook Statistics

Some very interesting Facebook statistics are available at Social Bakers. So we put a few of these together here, just to give you an idea of what’s happening on Facebook as we write.

Firstly we will look at Facebook penetration worldwide. There’s really two ways to look at this; absolute numbers or penetration as a % of the population.

In numbers, the United States is, naturally, way ahead of the rest of the field with over 150 million Facebook users or the equivalent to half of its population. Ireland’s figure is always going to be low in comparison and we have 1.9m Facebook users, or just shy of half the population.

When looking at the numbers, it’s worth remembering that Facebook was originally only in the English language. It wasn’t until early 2008 that it began to translate in to French, Spanish and German. So some countries may only be beginning to adopt the Facebook format as it becomes localised in their language.

The numbers in terms of penetration are, if nothing, slightly funny. The principality of Monaco having the highest penetration in the world! It’s easy for the smaller states to get a high penetration rate and after Monaco and the Falkland Islands the rates drop off rabidly. Ireland lies a decent 28^th in terms of penetration showing that we ‘box above our weight’ in relative to our population size.

China lies 212^th with a penetration of a mere 0.04%. But China has its own social networking sites and the biggest, Renren.com, has about 70m users alone.

One figure that did jump out was that of the Vatican State which has only 20 users. And before you muse, no, the boss doesn’t have his own Facebook page, but he does have his own social networking site pope2you.net (even has its own iPhone App).

Down to the top brands in Ireland as determined by the numbers of fans each brand page has. The winner, by a long shot, was Baileys and one would assume that it’s the brands international presence that gets it over the million. In second place was Blackberry followed by the nation’s staple diet, Guinness. But that brand had split itself into Guinness and Guinness Ireland.

The latter page makes for interesting reading – as fans seem to have a real affinity with the brand and post up some great comments.

As for the (other) Guinness page… well if you wall still has a large graphic trying to ‘get you in the mood for St Patricks Day, well I think is time to have a chat with the person/people looking after your social media strategy. I appreciate it a page dedicated to St Patricks Day, but it’s the page that visitors land on and that should be looked at.