In October 2007 I wrote about “Facebook Demographics Direct From Their System” that gave an account of Facebook’s democraphic composition using a few statistics that might be interesting to marketers. Ten months later we followed up with “Facebook Demographics 2008 Update - It’s Getting Older In There” which showed that fastest growing group, the 35-54 year old segment, grew at a rate of 172.9% in that period.

Below is our third granular examination of Facebook’s demographics and statistics directly from their Social Ads platform.  The biggest surprise (perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising) was that Facebook’s 35-54 year old demographic segment not only continued to grow the fastest, but it excelerated to a 276.% growth rate over the past 6 months. That demo is DOUBLING roughly ever two months. Here’s the full breakdown:

Download 2009 Facebook Demographics and Statistics as an Excel spreadsheet

Top Insights:

1)  The 35-54 year old demo is growing fastest, with a 276.4% growth rate in over the approximate 6 months since we last produced this report

2) The 55+ demo is not far behind with a 194.3% growth rate

3) The 25-34 year population on Facebook is doubling every 6 months

4) For those interested in advertising alcohol on Facebook, there are 27,912,480 users 21+, representing 66.3% of all users

5) Miami is the fastest growing metropolitan area (88.5%) and Atlanta (6.4%) is the slowest

6) There are more females (55.7%) than males (42.2%) on Facebook - 2.2% are of unknown gender.

7) The largest demographic concentration remains the college crowd of 18-24 year olds (40.8%) which is down from (53.8%) six months ago.

Take away? Facebook is being rapidly adopted by parents and professionals. Should a marketer be concerned about this shift if they’re focused on youth marketing?

No. Facebook’s ad targeting enables zero waste from an age targeting perspective.  Additional, Facebook Pages now have an age restriction feature. What I think we’ll see in 2009 is a flurry of alcohol marketing as Facebook approaches a critical 70% concentration of legal drinking age users. The 21+ demo should reach that 70% mark the end of Q1. The alcohol category does pretty well in recessionary times afterall!

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Things are certainly heating up in the District of Columbia in preparation for a myriad of inauguration related a events. We’re playing a small part in getting the word out about certain activities and I’d like to share two things with you related to our work with Destination DC - the lead organization focused on managing and marketing Washington, DC as a premier global convention, tourism and special events destination, with a special emphasis on the arts, cultural and historical communities.

A couple months back, Destination DC asked us to develop a microsite for the upcoming Lincoln Bicentennial celebration which you can see here:

Instead of simply cranking out a microsite in expectation of a number of other projects coming down the pike like this, we though deeply about our client’s needs, and realized that they’d want to create 5 or 6 similar sites like this over the next year or so. We came back with a strategy that called for the creation of a Wordpress powered microsite creation tool that would give Destination DC the ability to rapidly deploy new microsites with little or no help from us.  This strategy delivers huge value beyond a single microsite being created, saving the organization the cost of creating microsites each time they need to promote an event in the city.

At the heels of the coming Obama inauguration, Destination DC was able to deploy a microsite for the Lincoln 2.0 Ball with just a few minutes of support from us, and now they’re ready to let the world know that this is the event you won’t want to miss during inauguration season.

If you’re hungry for more inauguration insights from the official source of tourism information in DC, Destination DC has been busy setting up a digital footprint for your convenience:

Vistit Destination DC’s Full Inauguration Information Portal

Follow their Twitter Stream of Insider Tips

Become their Fan on Facebook

Join the 2009 Presidential Inauguration Facebook Event

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Those of us at iStrategyLabs are excited about a project that just rolled off our digital presses.  For the last few weeks, our team of creatives have been burning the midnight oil to create a 60-second high-definition web animation for the DC-based startup, ShareMeme.

ShareMeme, which is part of the LaunchBox Digital family (a DC based startup incubator), is an innovative web service created by Ahson Wardak and Luc Castera.  ShareMeme simplifies your online communication by allowing you to share content – or send invites, or poll questions or reminders — to all of your friends – whether they’re on Twitter, Facebook or G-chat – from a single spot.  For the serial networkers among us, it’s a real lifesaver.

But don’t just read about it: watch the video and see for yourself:

ShareMeme in 60 Seconds (HD) from ShareMeme on Vimeo.

Our work for ShareMeme was borne out of the belief that expertly crafted video can tell the story of a company or service in a way that words alone never will.  Instead of relying on a few paragraphs of copy – which are likely to be skimmed if read at all – video allows us to define a brand and share a message using sharp visuals, foot-stomping music, voiceover and, of course, some carefully honed copy.  In short, the video fully encapsulates the brand, which distills a message into an engaging audio-visual experience.  And a little vimeo magic makes it possible to elegantly embed a video into a site, in HD-quality, in a way that compliments the visual layout.

It’s also worth noting that iStrategyLabs wrote ShareMeme’s web copy and consulted on the website’s design.

A number of very talented people contributed to the project.  iStrategyLab’s Zach Goodwin created the concept, wrote the script, and art directed the video.  Erik Loften, designer, After Effects guru and all-around good guy, handled the animation.  Hugh McElroy of Ruffian Records opened up his recording studio for vocal tracking and lent his expert ear to the mix.

For those who are interested in seeing how these videos come to life, check out the original hand-drawn storyboard that eventually became the video here:

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