In developing a social media strategy identifying who your audience is and where you can find them is critical. Given that there are currently more than 900 million Facebook accounts, and 155.0 million of them are in the United States, it is likely that your targeted audience is logging in on a daily basis. If you are a political candidate, elected official, or an advocacy group trying to influence public policy, a considerable portion of your audience resides on Facebook.
According to the US Census Bureau, in 2010, there were 229.7 million people over the age of 18 living in the United States, of which, 210.8 million (91.8%) were US citizens eligible to vote. During the 2010 election cycle, there were 137.3 million (65.1% of eligible voters) registered to vote, and 95.99 million (45.5% of eligible voters) who voted in the November election.
Though applying these percentages to Facebook will not provide accurate results, they can provide a sense of the size of the voting population present on the social networking site. According to Facebook, there are 142.5 million accounts registered to individuals over the age of 18. If 91.8% of them were citizens, we would have roughly 130.8 million eligible voters on Facebook. If 66.1% of that number were registered, there would be 86.5 million registered voters on Facebook, and therefore 59.5 million (45.5% of eligible voters) who might turn out in this years presidential election (my guess is that this number will be hire as voter registration efforts kick into gear).
The most successful politician on Facebook is President Barack Obama, with 26.6 million people who “like” his page. That number represents 3.0% of all Facebook accounts. Though it is highly unlikely that 100% of his Facebook followers are US citizens who are over the age of 18 and registered to vote, if we assumed for the moment that they were, he could have as many as 12.6% of people eligible to vote in the United States in his audience. Certainly when President Obama speaks, Facebook listens.
Though his campaign expended considerable resources to establish this sizable presence, today his only cost to engage with this audience is the time it takes to update his status. Though the campaign should know what the average cost was per follower, the ROI on that investment every time he engages is substantial. In addition, think for a minute about the insight data that they have to analyze about who their followers are, where they are located, and all of the other demographic data that comes with it.
When you compare the cost of reaching these populations with a single direct mail piece ten years ago, and multiplied that by the number of status updates posted weekly, the ROI for this candidate is stunning.
Do you think the effort of building an audiences on Facebook is worth the return on investment? How should you be engaging your audience to strengthen your relationship with them? What content should you be delivering to keep these audiences engaged?
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