Mind Blowing Canadian Facebook Usage Statistics

EDIT: See more mind-blowing Alberta-specific Facebook usage statistics in our blog post, as well as BC-specific social media stats.

EDIT: See our updated infographic on Canadian Internet usage statistics, covering search, mobile, and social media.

Last month, we met with Alfredo Tan who is the National Director of Facebook Canada, and he shared with us some amazing statistics about Facebook’s Canadian user base.
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This infographic can be shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License

First of all, it is important to qualify what Facebook considers a user. An active Facebook user is a user that logs in on a computer (not a mobile device) and is only counted once every 30 days.

• There are 15 million monthly active users in Canada on Facebook every month. This is half the population that logs into Facebook on a monthly basis!
• There are 9+ million active Canadian users a day.
• Canadian’s spend an average of over 400 minutes on Facebook per month.
• Canadian’s are one of the friendliest countries on the planet – with the highest average number of friends of 190. The rest of the world has an average of 130 friends per user.
• In comparison, 6S Marketing staff have an average of 524 friends each – I wonder if we’re the friendliest digital marketing agency in the world?
• Facebook has a daily audience greater than 2 Super Bowls and 6X that of Hockey Night in Canada.

Some comparison stats:

• According to Facebook UK, the recent Royal Wedding had only 6.8 million people log-in and talk about the event during a 24 hour span, compared to Canada’s 9+ Million each day.
• According to a post by Mashable, 116,010,760 American’s are on Facebook. With an estimated US population of 309,003,000, this works out to approximately 38% of Americans having a Facebook profile compared to  50% of Canadians!

Some other insights from the meeting:

• Alfredo also reinforced the fact that just because Facebook is “where its at right now” does not mean every company should use it. Really focusing on the marketing objectives of your company, and how to best use Facebook as a marketing tool is often lost in the rush to establish a presence on Facebook.

• Conversion tracking will not be returning to the reporting interface anytime soon as it turned out to be a privacy issue for Facebook.

How should advertisers think about Facebook as a marketing tool for their company?

So how should you best use Facebook as a marketing medium? Alfredo made the point to think of Facebook as a medium to use above and after the conversion funnel – or Google – as consumers still use Google the most to do their research online.

As the stats show above, 9+ million users in Canada log on each day. They are obviously doing some research and/or purchasing while spending their time online. Facebook is fantastic for “reminder” advertising to these people who come from Google, or perhaps use Google after they have been on Facebook. This gives the advertiser a chance to reach their audience at least three times while Canadians are browsing online.

How are you using Facebook in your online marketing strategy?