Oct 22 2009
Facebook New Zealand Demographics – Age Distribution and Gender
A couple of weeks ago we blogged on New Zealand Facebook statistics, in particular we reported:
- There are more Kiwi women on Facebook than men (57.5% female vs 42.5% male) and
- Most of the New Zealand users of Facebook are in the 18-24 or 25-34 age range.
This led me to wonder, what is the percentage of each gender in each age range? Are there any interesting trends? Are there any age ranges where men are more common?
And also, now that Facebook is the most popular site in NZ (aside from Google), what percentage of the NZ population is on Facebook now, and how does that change for each age range?
By the way, in case you hadn’t heard, Facebook overtook TradeMe in July as the most popular destination site for New Zealanders – here’s a graph from Google Trends for websites. (P.S. If you want to know what the other most popular sites in NZ are, here’s the Top 100 according to Alexa and the top 20 according to Hitwise).
Graph of visits to Trademe.co.nz and Facebook.co.nz (New Zealand visitors only)
So, let’s use the demographic information from the Facebook advert tool to understand New Zealand’s Facebook demographics a bit better:
The gender gap is strongest for older users
The younger age ranges are much closer to gender parity than the older age ranges. The 20-24 age range has the highest proportion of men, with 47% male and 53% female. As the age increases though, the percentage of men decreases. The 50-54 age range has the lowest proportion of men, 35% male and 65% female.
% of each gender on Facebook, by age range (% of those who stated a gender)
Nearly all young kiwis are on Facebook
A famous quote about Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings is that the world is divided into two types of people, those who have read it, and those who are going to read it. It could be that the same is true of Facebook in New Zealand – kiwis are divided into those who are on Facebook already, and those who are going to be on Facebook soon!
Dividing the number of Facebook users at each age range (from Facebook’s advert tool) by the total number of New Zealanders in each age range (from the NZ census website) shows that the younger age ranges are almost totally assimilated already. Nearly 90% of the 20-24 age range is on Facebook already. The percentage of Kiwis on Facebook falls quickly as age increases – only 30% of 40-44 year olds are on Facebook. And the percentage continues to fall slowly as age increases – only 17% of the over 60’s are on Facebook.
Estimated percentage of the NZ population on Facebook, at each age range, for each gender and total.
Of course this is just an estimate, and in particular there is no guarantee that the number of users reported by Facebook is indeed correct. But given the popularity of Facebook in New Zealand, it can’t be too far wrong.
So if you want to try an advertising medium that will reach a very high proportion of New Zealanders, then Facebook should be your second choice after Google Adwords. First Rate incorporates Facebook ads in the overall online marketing mix (which also includes SEO, Adwords PPC and performance advertising, all tracked by Google Analytics). Please do contact us to understand how Facebook advertising can benefit your business.
The fine print
Facebook allows advertising on a cost-per-click basis as we illustrated last time. And these adverts can be targeted by age, city, gender, education, relationship status and keyword, allowing very strong demographic targeting. The advert tool has these options for the advert targeting:
Demographic targeting options for adverts on Facebook
As you can see, the estimated number of people is shown, and this is where I got the estimated number of NZ Facebook users at each age range from, including gender:
Estimated total number of people in NZ on Facebook
Estimated number of women over 30 in NZ on Facebook
Estimated number of married women over 30 in NZ on Facebook
P.S. Plenty of other blogs have used the same trick to get useful insights about the demographics on Facebook. Here are a selection of some of the best:
- Facebook Market Research Secrets and 2/3 of Facebook users aren’t (necessarily) women by Alec Saunders
- Facebook Secretly Reveals Demographic Data on the All Facebook blog
- Where Does Facebook Grow From Here and Facebook Growth By Country and the Slowdown in App Usage on the O’Reilly Radar blog
- Facebook Gender Demographics – A Comparison by Country on the Ad Chap blog
Nice collection of information. It is possible in Newzeland, Female’s ratio is high in overall population. I think if consider the entire world..Woman ratio as facebook user is very low. Most of In Asian Countries female are not going to use facebook or any kinda social networking sites. But you did well. Nice presentation.
Thanks for your comment, that’s an interesting question.
I just checked a few Asian countries and it seems that the Female bias on Facebook applies to many of them as well.
Malaysia 48.9% Male 51.1% Female
Japan 46.4% Male 53.6% Female
Vietnam 49.5% Male 50.5% Female
Hong Kong 47.9% Male 52.1% Female
Singapore 49.2% Male 50.8% Female
However there were a couple of the countries I tried that had extremely strong male biases, which is maybe what you were referring to:
India 69.1% Male 30.9% Female
Indonesia 60.5% Male 39.5% Female
Clearly its a complex situation and there are a number of cultural and societal factors that cause these biases to exist.
By the way these were all 18 years and older figures. A factor of the New Zealand data was that the female bias increased with the age of the users. I haven’t checked to see if the female bias increases for these countries.
Another point is that the number of users reported for Korea, Japan and China are very very low. I would suspect that the only users of FB in those countries are expats, i.e. “western” people living in those countries.
Hi Stuart,
thanks for the comment on my post, the alternatives to Alexa is good!
On you post above, you have not treated the “unspecified” gender specifically – have you looked at how large part of the FB users that have not specified a gender? (Nowadays you need to specify gender, but previously you didn’t, which means that there’s still a number of profiles without gender (Look eg at all 30 year old, all 30 male and all 30 female – the last two probably doesn’t sum up to the first)
Hi Johan,
yes I did consider the number of people who didn’t specify their gender, but for simplicity I decided not to include that data.
There were two reasons why I decided to do that, (a) there didn’t seem to be any trends that would affect the result, and (b) for the two younger age ranges the sum of the males and females was actually HIGHER than the reported total number of users! There must be something dodgy about the Facebook stats so that the difference between the total and the sum of the males and females can not be assumed to be because of people who didn’t specify their gender
Here though is the difference between the total and the sum of the males and females:
15-19 Years -0.1%
20-24 Years -0.2%
25-29 Years 2.9%
30-34 Years 5.1%
35-39 Years 4.9%
40-44 Years 7.3%
45-49 Years 6.1%
50-54 Years 7.2%
55-59 Years 9.5%
60-64 Years 9.0%
I believe other blog posts have shown that the % of people who do not give a gender gets higher as the age ranges get older.
As I said above the female % and the male % were calculated as a percentage of the sum of the females and male (that’s why the percentage add up to 100%). However in the second graph the ‘all’ % was calculated using the total users (i.e. including the people who did not give a gender).