Facebook Growth Regions and Gender Split

Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it’s fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May:

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Over the last three months, Facebook has added members across all regions, with the strongest growth coming from Europe, South America, and the Middle East/North Africa:

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In Europe, growth has been especially impressive in Italy and Spain. I’m not sure when the Italian translation of Facebook launched, but soon after, Italians started signing up in droves. The (crowdsourced) Spanish translation was completed within a month and launched in early 2008. I’ve read reports that users in Spain have used the site to connect with long lost relatives in Latin America. Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay were Facebook’s fastest-growth countries in South America. In late May, some Radar readers were highlighting Facebook’s growing popularity in Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile.

I don’t have any particular insight into how Facebook is growing in the Middle East and North Africa, but the company has added lots of users in Tunisia, Morocco, and Turkey. (I encourage Radar readers from the region to share their thoughts in the comments.)

Having grown up in Southeast Asia, I’ve been detecting more interest in Facebook among friends in the region. But for now Facebook still lags Friendster and Multiply. In fact Facebook has far less users in all of Asia than users from Canada! Similarly, the U.K. has more than twice the number of Facebook users than all of Asia. Facebook has to contend with homegrown social networks and slightly different online habits: Asian internet users spend more time on gaming and instant messaging. But even with their relatively small user base and amidst a competitive environment, Facebook is growing in Asia (they added 1.5M users from the region in the last 12 weeks).

Another interesting tidbit about Facebook’s recent growth, is that the fast-growing regions discussed above are adding teens (13-17) and college-age (18-25) users at a faster rate than North America.

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With a commanding share of college-age users in its home country, U.S. growth has been strongest among working age users (26-59). I was expecting stronger growth in the teen market (13-17), but teens remain the slowest growing group in the U.S.

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The Gender split has persisted: Females now outnumber Males, 51% to 44%. In late May the Female to Male split was 41% to 34%. The share of users who decline to state their gender dropped from 24% in late May to 5% in early December.

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That Females so outnumber Males may surprise people. While the Female/Male distribution has persisted over time, there is quite a bit of variation across regions. The Middle East/North Africa and Africa are the only regions where Male Facebook users outnumber Females.

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