When your network has grown to an extent that its population has crossed 350 Million in total, it is bound to have a population that is quite diverse. The social network’s data team rolled out quite a detailed report on How Diverse is Facebook? The survey carried out was based on analyzing the surnames of its users in the US, which was then used to divide US users as per their ethnicity. Good to know about such diversity, but very strange methodology.
The result states that the population is dominated by the Asian and Pacific islanders with quite a significant drop in the Hispanic populace. So why exactly was there a need for such a survey? The idea is to learn and understand how varied is Facebook’s user base and how does their use of the service changes? And how would this help Facebook? The ultimate idea is to understand how each of these users interact and connect with each other. Again that actually helps Facebook look forward and learn how to actually target the varying audience and provides useful stats to place future predictions on.
The methodology which Facebook used is based on the US Census of Bureau’s Genealogy Project which also breaks down population stats based on the how frequent are particular surnames and divided by race and ethnicity. And as you can make out, it relies entirely on a person’s surname and implements the same for Facebook users. Take for example that there are around a thousand users at Facebook at any time and each of them has a surname of John, based on the Census Genealogy, 733 of them would be white, 222 of them Black and there on. Of course that sounds like a very random method to classify any users ethnicity but those numbers aren’t exact rather just estimations to only give a rough idea of each users ethnicity.
The results of this provide Facebook a way to divide or give a vague picture of the division of populations within the social network. The end result is a graph which shows how each ethnic population increases with the rise in over all Facebook user population. Apparently the survey conducted in the US shows an exponential growth amongst the Whites, which isn’t surprising given that majority of its population is white. So what do we make out of it? We can simply take up the same chart and replace the high rise as per what ethnicity dominates one’s particular region.
How else could this be applied to? Well Facebook might actually integrate the first names of users within this search to have a broader and a better picture on how one can learn about the ethnic diversity. Other than that, it can also apply the same to each user, this could be of great assistance to help them learn how diverse is their group of friends and how each one of them interacts with others. This would give Facebook a more thorough picture of how the network is being used by diverse ethnic groups and which one of them is more active.
