I recently decided to take a closer look at Facebook’s advertising features and capabilities. In doing so, I found the ad campaign creation tools to be intuitive and somewhat robust!  I also learned a great deal about the demographics of the Facebook subscriber base which I have focused on in this post. I began by getting counts of Facebook users by country. The U.S. is clearly Facebook’s biggest market which is what one would expect.

Counts of Facebook Users by Country(as of 6/6/13)

Total number of users in the U.S. (ages 13+): 160 million
Total number of users in the U.K. (ages 13+): 30 million
Total number of users in India (ages 13+): 64 million
Total number of users in Japan (ages 13+): 14 million
Total number of users in China (ages 13+): 580K

Next, I wanted to find out more about Facebook’s 160 million users in the U.S. Below is a breakdown of counts by gender and age group. This data shows that overall, Facebook has approximately 19.4% more female users than male users. There are nearly double the number of male users below the age of 18 as there are female users of the same ages. On the other hand, the total number of female users between the ages of 46 and 64 exceed the total number of male users in the same age range by ~53%.

Counts of Facebook Users by Gender and Age

Total number of male users in U.S. (ages 13+): 72 million
Ages 13 – 18: 15.4 million
Ages 19 – 25: 17.8 million
Ages 26 – 35: 17.2 million
Ages 36 – 45: 11.6 million
Ages 46 – 55: 8.4 million
Ages 55+: 9.4 million

Total number of female users in U.S. (ages 13+): 86 million
Ages 13 – 18: 8.2 million
Ages 19 – 25: 18.4 million
Ages 26 – 35: 19.4 million
Ages 36 – 45: 15.0 million
Ages 46 – 55: 12.6 million
Ages 55+: 14.6 million

In summary, the largest percentage of Facebook’s user base lives in the U.S. The majority of users in this group are men between the ages of 13 – 45 and women between the ages of 19 – 55. Lastly, there are approximately 19.4% more female users than male users making females an important demographic group for the social networking site.