Love in the Time of Facebook – An Analysis of Relationship Demographics on Facebook

When it comes to relationship status, not all countries are created equal, at least not in the world of online social networking.

According to statistics obtained from Facebook’s analytics system, there is a disproportionately large percentage of users reporting their relationship status as “single” in Middle-Eastern and South Asian countries; meanwhile, there is an equally heavy percentage of users reporting their relationship status as either “In a relationship,” “Engaged,” or “Married” in European countries.

The top ten “most single” countries (as measured by the percentage of Facebook users reporting “single” status in terms of users reporting any relationship status) are Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia and Ghana.

In contrast, the top ten “least single” countries (as measured by the percentage of Facebook users reporting “in a relationship,” “engaged,” or “married” in terms of users reporting any relationship status) are Finland, New Zealand, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Luxembourg, Australia, Ireland, Switzerland.

Glancing at the gender balance of Facebook users in the top 10 most- and least-single countries, we can see some stark and statistically significant findings. Countries with the highest percentage of single Facebook users also have a disproportionately high amount of male Facebook users numbering among those singles.  Countries with a closer balance of single / non-single Facebook users also have a closer gender balance among those singles.

Overall the average percentage of single Facebook users is approximately 39%. The United States, comprising the largest percentage of Facebook users, shows 35% of users reporting “single” relationship status, making the typical American Facebook user slightly less single than average.

It’s important to note that these figures are in proportion to the number of users reporting any relationship status at all. Many Facebook users do not report any relationship status at all, and this demographic information shows equally intriguing results.

On average, 40% of Facebook users do not report any relationship status at all; this could be due to any number of reasons, but likely largely stems from privacy concerns. The five countries with highest percentage of users reporting a relationship status are: the United States, South Africa, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Australia, Denmark, Honduras and Puerto Rico. Of those ten, five are native English-speaking countries, and the remaining countries have either compulsory ESL (English as a Second Language) programs or high percentages of non-compulsory ESL learners. We can conclude, therefore, that statistically speaking, Facebook users from English-speaking countries tend to report their relationship status more often than Facebook users from non-English-speaking countries.

This entry was posted on April 10th, 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.