In general, the overall numbers are surprising, you might even say shocking. Canadians are buying into social media on a grand scale, with Facebook leading the charge. Per capita, Facebook users from Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary outnumber their nearest American cousins from Boston! And the curve continues…
In sheer numbers, Torontonians dominate Facebook’s global population. With just short of 500k members in its network, Toronto boasts nearly 2 1/2 times that of New York City’s network, which weighs in at just over 200k.
Sean Moffit from Agent Wildfire via Buzz Canuck posted the following numbers to illustrate the point:
There’s no doubt that Toronto, Ottawa and Boston’s strong showings are related to the high number of students in each city, but the numbers speak volumes beyond that. Social media has hit a tipping point in Canadian culture, and these numbers are only expected to grow.
That said, Facebook still has a long way to catch up to MySpace’s 80%+ market share. And let’s not forget that prior to MySpace, Friendster was the dominant social network. Friendster has since dropped to a puny 0.34% of the share. In the future, look for up and comers Buzznet, iMeem, Twitter, and Bebo to climb the popularity charts.
The winner will always be the community which provides the best balance of access/restrictions, flexibility/structure and license/commons to enable the user’s greatest relevance within the network.
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15 Responses to “Facebook is connecting with Canadians”
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April 18th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Canadians dominate Facebook population…
In general, the overall numbers are surprising, you might even say shocking. Canadians are buying into social media on a grand scale, with Facebook leading the charge. Per capita, Facebook users from Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary outnumber their…
April 18th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
So Toronto really is as cool as we think
April 19th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Yes, in fact, it is. So is Halifax!
April 19th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
These statistics are even more interesting if you use corrected Statistics…
Toronto [Proper] 2.5M
New York [Proper] 8.9M
Toronto CMA 6M
New York MA 19M
As for the student angle… New York City proper has over a million students in public schools [K - 12]; City Universities [CUNY] have another 250,000K NYU alone another 50,000K… Add up all the SUNYs and other private colleges in the MA, you’re easily around 500,000+ University students…
204K Facebookers does seem small. Interesting
April 19th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Gord…
Where did you get your [proper] stats?
What does MA, and CMA stand for?
April 20th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Agreed that [proper] is almost a useless stat as it measures only the number of people who live within the ‘political’ boundaries of the City… Toronto’s [proper] population does not include Mississauga or Vaughn, which is ridiculous.
CMA is Census Metropolitan Area; a statistic used mostly, I find in Canada; MA is simply Metropolitan Area… American and European cities seem to be measured a number of ways. I generally sort through either atlases and of course Wiki for the most logical measure…
Example in a lot of Toronto Measurements, numbers are cited for the entire Golden Horseshoe; logically, Hamilton is NOT part of Toronto… But! then again…
A measure I like to use is one I call the “ComuterShed” [Think Watershed]. Toronto’s Primary [trains] and Secondary [buses] [rivers and tributaries] extends well into Hamilton; on up to Barrie and now pretty much all the way to Port Hope. One could say that within that ‘shed’ about 8 million folks are directly connected to Toronto. Likewise in NYC, the CommuterShed which is quite a bit more developed, like Toronto reaches out 75 to 100 miles, probably 20 to 25 million…
Of course; then you get into the Megalopolis, BosNYWash… Where for 700 miles or so there is no single county with less than 50,000 folks and the population is roughly three times that of Canada’s.
In the meantime; its really quite important to give a nice big smile to the gal behind the counter at the Bodega and stop and chat with that nice lady in 201 when you run into her and her son while walking their dog
Other cool stats:
TTC Ridership 2005 = 431,220,000
GO Transit = 190,000 trips/day
NYC Subway & Buses = 1.4 Billion riders in 2005
PATH carries 240,000 folks from nearby NJ / day
Metro North, NJ Transit and the LIRR… Oh, who knows? – Then there are all these private bus lines…
Oh ya… One more cool stat… The Mayor of New York, heads the 6th largest government in the US with a police force 3/5th the size of the Canadian Army – nifty stuff
———–
…On a more related note; anecdotally, I’ve noticed that very few of my NYC MySpace contacts have remained active; BUT, Almost none of them have moved to FaceBook. Perhaps its the ‘burn-out’ factor you mentioned in previous posts…
A paraphrased quote from a Pal [Torontonian]… “I got bored with MySpace, too many kids and pages you can’t even read; FaceBook is like a cool and more organized version of my Outlook mailbox”.
April 26th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
We think we’re pretty connected but like I said on Sean’s post, there are only a few metros in all of Canada, so tons of Ontario-ans identify with Toronto as their central network, be they from Toronto or not.
And I wouldn’t say that social media has reached a tipping point because of Facebook’s popularity. Facebook just happens to be the “in” thing right now. You can look at a number of other isolated examples of things online that caught on quickly that didn’t mean anything big-picture wise. Look at instant messaging: People were using ICQ for IM for years, and then suddenly we became MSN messenger users. IM was just an isolated incident that didn’t necessarily lead to any other forms of interaction. It just meant that chat became a part of our lives. Same for Facebook: it’s rise in popularity does not mean is that SOCIAL MEDIA are becoming more prominent.
April 27th, 2007 at 12:02 am
A Thought On Facebook…
I had this to say in response to a post by Collin Douma discussing how Facebook is the “tipping point” for social media adoption:
We think we’re pretty connected but like I said on Sean’s (Moffit) post, there are only a few metr…
April 27th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
In light of these results, I am drawn to wonder even more why Canada is so often absent (excluded?) from general reporting of Internet usage. Every time ClickZ comes out with its “Active Home Internet Users by Country”, Canada is strangely absent.
When I asked the good folks at ClickZ how it could be that Canada, one of the world’s leading industrialized nations, a country with wide Internet and broadband penetration, was not included in their reporting, they replied, in effect, “We get our numbers from Nielson Netratings and they don’t include Canada.”
Humm…
April 27th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
[...] I had this to say in response to a post by Collin Douma discussing how Facebook is the “tipping point” for social media adoption: We think we’re pretty connected but like I said on Sean’s (Moffit) post, there are only a few metros in all of Canada, so tons of Ontario-ans identify with Toronto as their central network, be they from Toronto or not. And I wouldn’t say that social media has reached a tipping point because of Facebook’s popularity. Facebook just happens to be the “in” thing right now. You can look at a number of other isolated examples of things online that caught on quickly that didn’t mean anything big-picture wise. Look at instant messaging: People were using ICQ for IM for years, and then suddenly we became MSN messenger users. IM was just an isolated incident that didn’t necessarily lead to any other forms of interaction. It just meant that chat became a part of our lives. Same for Facebook: it’s rise in popularity does not mean is that SOCIAL MEDIA are becoming more prominent. [...]
April 29th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Daniel
Thanks for the post.
Nothing like asking why the numbers don’t include Canada and the answer replied is “because the numbers don’t include Canada” This is a well identified issue, one that I am often perplexed over. Maybe a business plan in that for a budding entrepreneur.
cheers
collin
May 18th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
As a follow-up… I recently started paying more attention to my FaceBook account. Its the Bizarro world to MySpace. For YEARS, and even recently I could never find a Toronto/CDN friend on MySpace. The reverse is true of FaceBook; I have yet to find a single NYC pal there… Its like; they are TWO separate worlds…
ALSO, I’ll hit on this more, somewhere else later; but it really seems like FaceBook is far more geared towards the “re-connect” than the “connect”… Of course that could just be the sentimental ME talkin’
Collin, please join the new FB group I started… Its nothin’ without YA!
May 18th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
I’m on holiday this week, facebook is included in that… but I will join next week for sure!
cheers
collin
May 19th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
A holiday from FaceBook? How dare you!
June 12th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
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