Facebook: Big in Canada
According to GridSkipper, six of the top 15 Facebook networks are Canadian. Toronto and Vancouver and one and three respectively, followed by Calgary (8), Ottawa (10), Montreal (12) and Edmonton (13).
(Just for reference, Edmonton has more Facebook members than Los Angeles. * )
This isn't a total surprise--each of those six cities is the hub for at least one large university (e.g. Toronto has three, Vancouver two).
However, my experiences with FB Edmonton suggest that it's different from other SNSs:
- It's where my junior and senior high school friends are. There is virtually no overlap between my LinkedIn network and my Facebook network.
- For most of the people I interact with, Facebook is their first social network. I'd guess that most of them haven't been active online (and thus no YASNS fatigue, no switching costs, etc.).
- There doesn't seem to be a lot of professional networking (though I might just be out of the loop on that).
- Moms. Lots of moms. That's probably just a result of FB becoming popular with an older demographic. On the other hand, we did some work we did for Capital Health a couple of years ago that showed that moms have pretty strong networks and act as connectors within their families. So it might be more than just demographics.
If these observations generalize, then FB's popularity in Canada might be because of an influx of older first-time social network users. Nothing wrong with that; everyone needs a place to post picture of their cat (or baby). It'll be interesting to see if the growth continues.
* One commenter on Valleywag suggests that "since FB started through US colleges, most people label their Network as their college, not their region. Whereas in later markets, regional labels might be more prevalent." Yup. Could be.
