MedTouch Blog – Making Healthcare Interactive

Frequent guests know of my love for all things Facebook and winsome burger commercials, but I never thought the two would meet so well.

The NY Times reports today about the lose a friend, gain a whopper campaign:

While many trivial actions do prompt Facebook to post an alert to all your friends… striking someone off your list simply is not one of them.

It is this policy that Burger King ran afoul of this month with its “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign, which offered a free hamburger to anyone who severed the sacred bonds with 10 of the friends they had accumulated on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was sending notifications to the castoffs letting them know they’d been dropped for a sandwich (or, more accurately, a tenth of a sandwich).

The campaign, which boasted of ending 234,000 friendships, is history now — Burger King chose to end it rather than tweak it to fit Facebook’s policy…

The ad, which proclaims a Whopper is stronger than friendship, is the first I’ve seen involving the de-leveraging of social networks.

I had thought, back in the day, Facebook did alert one to the changes in tides of friendships so I understand the nature of the policy: one’s social network should only grow.  But it does underscore how loose those bounds are: by Burger King’s math, every facebook friend is worth about $.25

I’m convinced that all media will soon be social — that is, nearly all content we consume will be recommended to us rather than programmed at us. Stay tuned for more on that.

But I was fascinated by Facebook’s new ad system and the data I was able to find. For example, you can now target ads based on gender, location, and employment info — pretty slick for an online yearbook site.

Here’s some data I collected first hand about the demographics of who is on FB:

50 years +: 478,640
40-49 : 613,600
30-39 : 1,979,320
23-29 : 6,594,820
18-22 : 11,062,560
under 18 : 4,129,040

For those playing at home, that’s 24 million people total, with 87.5% under 30 but less than half “college-aged” — the population the site was due to serve.

Project the data 4-5 years from now, and you’ll have a population more like 50 million, with a larger chunk of 20/30’s graduates:

50 years +: 1,092,240
40-49 : 1,979,320
30-39 : 6,594,820
23-29 : 11,062,560
18-22 : 22,125,120
under 18 : 8,258,080

Estimates (obviously) 

But that’s assuming they do no aggressive advertising amongst AARP members.
So while I’m sure the general ads for skateboards, Mountain Dew, and Noxema will continue, my guess is each population will soon be getting their own targeted ads. And this is the genius of social network: the growth rate is exponential, but predictable. In 10 years, who knows — 100million? 200million?

NBC would kill for that kind of market share.