The Most (and Least) Facebooked Countries

Which countries have the highest number of Facebook users per capita? The analytics may surprise you.

According to Facebook demographics obtained this month, Iceland, the country with the highest percentage of Facebook users, shows an astonishing 43% of the total population using Facebook, meaning that according to Facebook’s statistics, almost half of Iceland’s 305,000 residents are on Facebook.

In contrast, the United States, the largest country in terms of total Facebook users, is nowhere near the most “facebook penetrated” country, when graphing the total number of Facebook users against the total population. In fact, the U.S. came in #16 out of 96 countries with measurable Facebook analytics, with a total Facebook penetration score of just around 15% of the population.

What trends does this data show? At first glance, the ten countries shown here seem to have little in common, but if we look closer, we see that nine out of these ten countries are either native English speaking countries or countries with a very high percentage of second-language English speakers.

The other end of the spectrum yields equally interesting results – the five least Facebooked countries are (in order), China, Vietnam, Ukraine, Russia and India, each of them showing less than .15% of the total population registered on Facebook. It bears mentioning, though, that while these countries show low proportions of Facebook users, at least China, Russia and India feature high internet connectivity and significant social networking activity; this means that social networks other than Facebook may be better reaching audiences in their native languages.

Facebook’s localization and expansion efforts are in fact starting to pay off, we are seeing huge growth in countries where facebook has been translated.  This is another topic for another day however!

This entry was posted on February 18th, 2009 and is filed under Social Networking, facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.