This guy says that 418,700 New Brunswickers are on Facebook. I will be interested to see his methodology when the report comes out. There are about 750,000 New Brunswickers but 73,000 of them are nine years old and under. Another 81,000 are over the age of 75. This means that unless lots of Grannies and babies are using Facebook, about 70% of New Brunswickers have a Facebook account.
We know from the latest Stats Canada data that 30% of New Brunswick’s 330,000 households do not have the Internet (the lowest percentage, by the way, in Canada).
If we take a leap and say that very few people in a household with no Internet would have Facebook accounts (this is a stretch – they could have Facebook and use it at the library or they could have a smart phone….) – that would mean that just about 100% of New Brunswickers of age (and under 75) and with the Internet at home has a Facebook account.
Given that there are two people of age in my home without Facebook accounts, this is unlikely.
So, I wait with anticipation to see the results of this study.
David – the data comes directly from Facebook. You are correct, there are a lot of grandmothers on Facebook according to that data. Grandfathers too. About 50,000 people over age 55 from NB are on Facebook. Of course, the data is self-reported, people join and quit every day, and Facebook cleans up spam accounts etc. so it is always moving. Still, the numbers are remarkable.
It also includes a lot of people like myself who moved elsewhere, but still identify themselves as being from NB. And always will.
It would not surprise me that 418,700 New Brunswickers have Facebook accounts. The level of usage is very high across Canada. Usage is not restricted to people between 9 and 75. Entire families – including the grandparents – are on Facebook, including mine.
I remember once making similar leaps over a daily newspaper’s readership numbers and NB literacy rates…something did not add up.
Nonetheless, even if the numbers were inflated by 20% (spam accounts, multiple accounts per person, company accounts, and sheer stat bloat could account for this), it would not deter from the fact NB has a high adoption rates of such social media gems. It would be interesting to see more in-depth usage data, or if proportionally similar take-up rates can be seen with less popular mediums such as Linked-In, Twitter, etc.
I wonder what the effect of Facebook usage is on productivity. How often have I caught staff facebooking instead of working – often enough to block facebook.com on our router. Course, with smartphones, that doesn’t help much. Perhaps I should ask staff to park phones at the door, much like schools demand students leave phones in their lockers during school hours.
In a recent survey of artists, my results indicated that 73% of them indeed used Facebook as their favourite social media tool. Given the distances in NB, Facebook seems like a reasonable way to visit the neighbours.