Flavio about Business 2.0

As the data in the facebook ad manager tool suggests, there are now 395′020 people on facebook within Switzerland. Given our current population of 7′554′661 we can deduct that 5.22% of the Swiss Population are now officially on facebook. From 18-25 year olds this number accrues to 187′480 people out of 714′000 people, so 26% of this generation are on facebook.

What does this mean?

• In other words, every 20th person in Switzerland is on facebook.
• Facebook is probably the most successful Social Network in Switzerland ever
• If you are young and live in an urban center like Zurich or Geneva you’re totally disconnected from what’s going on if you’re not on facebook.
• If you want to reach a large amount of young people in a very targed way (age, sex, relationship status etc), facebook provides an excellent opportunity.

I’ve been blogging about facebook growth within Switzerland for the past year and now I’ve taken these data points to see how facebook has grown within this time:

As visible on the graph above, we have seen rapid growth throughout the last 1.5 years and don’t seem to be done yet. And when you see what numbers Norway and Canada show there is good reason to believe this trend is continuing.

• Canada: 28.7 %
• Norway: 26.1 %

Soon every third Canadian is going to be on facebook. So if I were in Canada I’d better make sure my profile doesn’t show too much unnecessary information about myself, because you can be sure that your teacher and your future employer is on the site as well.

Let’s compare to our neighbors (numbers in parentheses show growth in one(!) month)

• France 3.71% (+ 14%)
• Italy 0.78% (+ 24%)
• Germany 0.75% (+11%)
• Austria 1.33% (+14%)

Certainly France has a strong adoption due to it’s strong economic and social relations with both the UK and the USA and the lack of a domestic competitor. Germany’s growth clearly lacks behind others because of Studivz that apparently still has a strong lead over facebook within Germany (all their expansion projects to France, Italy, Poland etc have been abondoned, as I’ve been told from an inside source). Austria is probably just not as international and globally connected as Switzerland and is probably still stronger attached to Studivz. I don’t know why Italy lacks that far behind, perhaps they just prefer to meet up in person than hang out online (not a bad reason, if you ask me).