Inside Facebook provides key demographic and analytics data for Facebook marketers

InsideFacebook has developed a network of sites that are very useful to the Facebook marketer.  In fact, if you are serious about Facebook marketing you should have the following sites bookmarked.  I know I do.

AppData - Provides metrics for Facebook Apps. This data is not easily obtainable and InsideFacebook does a great job obtaining up to date data via scripting.   The trickiest part about scraping data from Facebook is putting up with inconsistency on Facebook’s end.  At various points in time apps were measured by total installs, % daily active users, total daily active users, and total monthly active users.  AppData does a great job of aggregating and displaying the data.

PageData - PageData examines Facebook Page trends.  Marketers take note as Facebook Pages have really been growing since the homepage redesign in March of 2009.  PageData can point out key trends in Facebook Page growth and has quickly become a favourite resource of mine.  Every facebook marketer should be interested in page growth data.

Inside Social Games - ISG is a great resource for every social games developer.  There is a lot of money to be made in social games right now and ISG provides a wealth of insight on the topic.

What’s most impressive though is the method by which Justin gets his most recent data for number of active Facebook users in the US.  The blog states the data was obtained using Facebook’s own advertising tools.

“All of these numbers are estimates provided by Facebook through its advertiser tools.”

Justin from InsideFacebook shares some interesting statistics about Facebook users, such as a decreasing trend in number of active Facebook users over age 55.  While interesting, I wouldn’t posit too much into this decrease.  Facebook itself responds to the post by saying the numbers are ‘estimations’ and not real-time stats.  I have my own personal theory that a small single digit percentage of users over age 55 in fact are just young adults that have purposely entered incorrect birth date information on Facebook.  Perhaps Facebook is now adjusting for this estimate.

It is interesting however to look at the age distribution of Facebook users.  Courtesy Insidefacebook we can see that the predominant demographic is users aged 18-25 on facebook.  A marketer’s dream.