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In October 2007, I wrote about “Facebook Demographics Direct From Their System” that gave an account of Facebook’s demographic 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 the 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 accelerated to a 276.4% growth rate over the past 6 months. That demo is DOUBLING roughly every 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? Parents and professionals are rapidly adopting Facebook. 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. Additionally, 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 aged users. The 21+ demo should reach that 70% mark at the end of Q1. The alcohol category does pretty well in recessionary times after all!