Minnesota-based Viking Magazine is doing a short piece about Facebook’s popularity in Norway, and emailed to ask if I could answer some brief questions – of course I can. And so I had to go re-check how many Norwegians are currently on Facebook. Using the trusty old method of pretending I’m making an ad targeted to all Norwegians, I found that there are 1,042,240 Norwegians on Facebook. Or at least, there are 1,042,240 Facebook profiles claiming to be Norwegians – a few are probably fake. There are 4 721 600 people living in Norway, according to Statistics Norway. Some are temporary residents who might not brand themselves “Norwegian” on Facebook. Accepting these inaccuracies, that means that about 22% of the Norwegian population is on Facebook. Not a drastic rise since October, but still growing significantly.
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
Luca
Hi Jill,
maybe you could find interesting a recent post made by my colleague Fabio Giglietto about growing trends of several Social Networks in different countries (http://larica-virtual.soc.uniurb.it/nextmedia/2007/12/21/paese-che-vai-social-networks-che-trovi/). We started asking why Facebook usage is so low in Italy and we discovered that Badoo is used by the 36% of italian teenagers between 18 and 19 yo. Understandig which SN fits better every country’s expectation about how a Social network should be it’s a interesting question.
cheers
Luca
ilan
hey there, i was wondering what’s the difference between the number you specify
and the one i get from this page > facebook.com/networks/67109325/Norway
where it say (by the time i write this comment) the norwegian network has 515,721 members.
does the advertising platform has different stats from the ‘open’ stats?
Jill Walker Rettberg
Hey ilan – if you follow my link in the post above (to “trusty old method”) you’ll see I describe using the advertiser’s demographic info to see how many people have signed up as “Norwegains”. The network “Norway” has far fewer members because a lot of people don’t choose to join the netowrk – yit’s not compulsory, and in fact, many people don’t even know it exists.
The short version of how to see Facebook demographics is to click the advertisers link at the bottom of each page, pretend you’re making an ad (just give it a fake website you’re going to promote) and then you get to play with the demographics. You don’t have to actually buy the ad.
ilan
thank you 🙂
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