By the Numbers: Facebook vs The United States [INFOGRAPHIC]

April 5, 2010 Muhammad Saleem Comments

By the Numbers: Facebook vs The United States [INFOGRAPHIC]

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. Follow him on Twitter for more social media insights.

Facebook’s official company statistics outline the breakdown of the sites over 400 million active users. While the site points out about 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States, it doesn’t dive deeper into the U.S. numbers.

To find out more about the average American Facebook user and how he or she compares to the average American, we dug a little further. After crunching the numbers and comparing the data, this is what we found.

Click the Image for Full Size Version

Editor’s Note: The DC number is greater than 100% because of the disproportionate amount of people who technically reside elsewhere but live in DC, and it would include people in surrounding cities who claim to live in DC on their profiles.

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Tags: data, data visualization, facebook, infographic, trending, united states, visualization

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mddodd
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Mariel Hart
How does 125.7% of DC have a Facebook account?
justible
Why are the numbers of "whites" living in the US so divergent from 2008 census numbers? If you had used that data, the Facebook numbers would correlate almost perfectly with the physical population. What source told you that 84% if the US is white? The 1940 Farmer's Almanac?
ktdempsey
So, it's estimated that almost 38% of Americans are "Facebook Users"?!! (116/309)
...this seems like a strange figure when you consider that the highest percentage for any one state is only just above 31%, with the exception of DC, of course. I could possibly believe that there are 116,000,000 "Total Accounts", including all personal profiles, promotional profiles (bands, celebs, etc.), and useless group pages (you know...the ones that people "become a fan" of)...still seems unlikely, though.

Maybe I'm just really bad at math.

Any ideas?
sodak
Ha! to everyone who thinks South Dakota is full of backwards people. I'm sick and tired of people thinking South Dakotans are hicks or something. The chart shows that if we are hicks; we are the kind of hicks who utilize social networking in a high percentage.
sumdumgoi
Wow a non-iPad/non-Google article!!!!
tbonerst
Here's what the US population breakdown should be (per 2008 US Census Bureau):

White (non-Hispanic) = 65.6%
Hispanic = 15.4%
Black = 12.2%
Native American = 0.8%
Asian Pacific Islander = 4.5%
Two or more races = 1.5%

The problem is Muhammed didn't properly calculate the non-Hispanic white population (Hispanics can be of any race according to census designations). This casts suspicion on many of the other demographic figures as well. What else wasn't properly calculated?
tbonerst
The race proportions are completely wrong.
Vinoth Ragunathan
Woah, wait a god damn minute. When did facebook know if we were black, white, latino or asian? Oh yeah, I remember now, it's Facebook!
Jeff Greenhouse
Great infographic, but I'm concerned about some of the data. The racial distribution of the US population (for example) doesn't match up with what Wikipedia lists as of 2008:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_th...

I see various sources listed, but I'd rather see each source identified for the graph or chart it's used in.
ericjm
Facebook error message: 'this photo is either too tall or too skinny to post' LOL!
Giles (Webconomist)
Good general stats; as others point out, listing their city while living in a nearby town can be a challenge for truly targeted data sets. One also wonders about folks who intentionally use mis-information or don't take providing information on location/politics/religion seriously.
taylormills
Philadelphia and Dallas aren't messing around!
tmabe
Take a good look at the percentage of Conservatives! It is important to note that there are more conservatives in the US than liberals although the government and lobbyists would have you think otherwise!