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Two Apps for Analyzing You and Your Friends on Facebook

This past week we saw a couple new Facebook applications gain millions of users — and they weren’t social games. Both offer interesting statistical analyses about your Facebook data (as well as alliteration). One is called Status Statistics and it looks at all of your status updates on Facebook, and figures out a surprising amount about you. The other app is called Friend Facts, and it looks at all of the profile data about your friends, and figures out things like which TV shows and books are most popular with your friends.



With Status Updates, you just load the app, give it a little while to make its calculations, then you can see a rather scary list of everything you’ve ever posted. Personally, I post from Twitter to Facebook — out of my 694 total updates, 499 have come from the service. My most frequent word is “[post]” because I use that designation to let my Twitter followers know that I’m tweeting one of my articles. And, because I’ve been covering Facebook heavily for the last few years, my most commonly-used word is, well, “facebook.” The service also tells me that I do most of my updating during business hours, and early in the week. That is certainly true, as I use Twitter and Facebook status updates more for work-related information than for sending the world a constant stream of my personal feelings. The app also lets you analyze your friends’ updates.



Friend Facts, meanwhile, tells me about who the people are on Facebook who see my status updates. They run on the nerdy side, shall we say. Radiohead is the top band, with 38 of my friends listing it on their profiles. The top TV Show is The Office, with 78 friends listing it. Out of all my friends, the most common name is “David.” A few more of my friends are men than women — a consequence of being friends with a lot of people in the guy-heavy tech world. In all, my Facebook friends live in 37 countries and 29 states.



In their own right, the apps are worth checking out purely for the sake of getting a new perspective on yourself and your Facebook friends. Bigger picture, this sort of data mining is surprisingly uncommon to see among third-party developers. Facebook makes a lot of user data available to developers, but not all of it (in a recent agreement with the privacy commissioner of Canada, Facebook said it would be adding more granular privacy controls over the coming months).



Still, some clever developers have put user data to quite practical uses. TV Guide’s integration of Facebook Connect, for example, does a good job of scouring the “Favorite TV Shows” section of your friends’ user profiles, and automatically showing you the most popular shows on the TV Guide site. Connect has done a good job integrating with media sites, so users can log in with their Facebook IDs and leave comments. But much of the service is still under development, and if it’s going to be the hit that Facebook hopes, the company and third parties will have to figure out how to balance data-sharing and user privacy.

Facebook’s Growth in Germany and Austria: Das ist gut!

Germany and Austria have far smaller populations of Facebook users than many other European countries, but that is starting to change, and fast — both countries made our list of the top ten fastest-growing in the region yesterday. Here’s a closer look at what’s happening.

Germany, a country with 82.1 million people, grew by 541,000 Facebook users over the course of last month to reach 4.36 million monthly actives. Austria is ten times smaller, with a population of 8.34 million — but it also grew by 14 percent, gaining 129,000 users to reach 1.03 million.

This means that even though Germany is much larger numerically, Facebook has only penetrated 5.3% of the population. Meanwhile, 12.3% of Austrians are now using the site every month.

It is especially meaningful that Facebook is getting this growth in the German-speaking part of the region, because it faces an entrenched incumbent: A clone of Facebook called studiVZ. Facebook sued the company last year for copying it to the degree that it merely replaced “Facebook’s blue colour scheme with a red one.” Facebook was “seeking to end StudiVZ’s illegal activity to ensure that users are not confused and that Facebook’s reputation remains unharmed.” The suit was settled out of court a month ago. At the time, we noted Facebook was growing fast in Germany; while we don’t have fresh data on studiVZ’s traffic, last we heard in April, it was around 5.5. million. In other words, studiVZ does not appear to have a dominant share of its home market, and Facebook is now growing in the middle of it.

Time will tell if studiVZ has differentiated itself well enough as a German-language social network to be able to hold its own versus what we expect to be Facebook’s continued growth among the 105 million native German speakers in the world. For a visual aid, check out the map of German speakers in Europe, below.



[Photo of a German town taken from Austria by Luiz Felipe Castro on Flickr; German language map via Wikimedia.]

The 15 Largest Restaurant Pages on Facebook

Yesterday, we offered 8 best practices for how restaurants can make use of Facebook pages. Here’s a look at the 15 restaurants and fast food chains with the most fans on Facebook. What’s most obvious is that fan bases are not directly tied to the overall size or type of restaurant. McDonald’s may be on top, but regional burger chain Chik-fil-A is second — and Burger King does not even have an official Facebook page.

Certainly, many of the brands on the list have promoted their pages through multimedia campaigns. But the takeaway for any restaurant, including local ones, is that Facebook pages are not based entirely on massive marketing budgets. It’s about how you can use a page to attract fans then convert them for your own marketing goals.

Also, we don’t have a way to measure how active fans are on a given page. So a smaller page may have many more users commenting, liking and otherwise engaging, while a larger one may be far less active.

Page Leaderboard – Restaurants and Fast Food
Rank Name Fans
1. McDonald’s 1,252,981
2. Chick-fil-A 1,205,399
3. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts 1,148,335
4. Pizza Hut 1,027,290
5. Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc. 987,069
6. TGI Friday’s (Woody) 986,198
7. Dunkin’ Donuts 936,211
8. Dairy Queen 721,421
9. Buffalo Wild Wings 706,670
10. Taco Bell 614,462
11. Baskin-Robbins 337,824
12. Papa John’s Pizza 327,543
13. Jamba Juice 318,931
14. Domino’s Pizza 313,127
15. Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches 241,507

Notes on methodology: There’s currently no way to easily collect every single restaurant and fast food company with a page on Facebook. We publish PageData, which tracks all of the data that Facebook makes available, and according to the categories of page that Facebook has grouped pages under. However, some companies’ pages are categorized as “Food and Beverage” while others’ are “Restaurants.” In both categories, there are also a smattering of other brands that make food but do not have restaurants. Some, like TGI Friday’s, are not categorized in Facebook’s directory so we’ve included the numbers directly from the Facebook page. There’s also the real-world complexity of brands that are both restaurants of sorts as well as brands you see in supermarkets, such as Ben & Jerry’s. If you spot other brands we’re missing, please let us know and we’ll update. And, finally, we’re only looking at pages with “vanity URLs,” as this indicates that Facebook has specifically verified that the page owner is actually the brand and not an imposter.


source: insidefacebook