Facebook might help you keep your job

Photo credit: California Studies Blog

During this economic downturn I would suggest that getting social on Facebook might help you keep the job you have.

Last week Comscore reported the astronomical growth in users of the monster social network Facebook. Naturally, I posted the article on my Twitter account (@kgrandia) and one of my online friends (Chris Eaton) posed a very insightful question: “think the increased facebook users have anything to do with the economy?”

I actually don’t think the economic downturn is resulting in more people signing up or actively using Facebook. If that was the case, we would have seen a big blip up in user activity in mid-September or so and any of the recent numbers I can find for Facebook show a pretty smooth growth curve, like this:

However, my Twitter friend Chris Eaton’s question did get me thinking really hard about Facebook and the real potential it has for helping you keep the job you have during these terrible economic times.

The sad truth is that a lot of people are losing their jobs right now and your employer may be put in that extremely horrible situation where he or she will have to choose who to keep and who to let go. Making such a choice comes down to a lot of “hard” factors like pay-levels, experience and sales performance. However, bosses are human after all and there are deeper cognitive “soft factor” processes at work in these decisions mas well. One of the biggies is empathy. The simplest definition of empathy is the ability to see a situation from “another person’s shoes.”

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Facebook User Profile: Canada 2008

Quite regularly I am asked about how many people are using Facebook in a certain country. And I now and know why, because such information is not readily available on Facebook and/or a Google search. So I thought I would start to post Facebook country user statistics as I develop them.

The numbers that I quote in this Canada 2008 profile are parsed out from the “Reach your Target Audience” function in Facebook’s advertising section, it’s the section that looks like this:

(Click to enlarge)

Canadian Facebook User Statistics as of December 12, 2008

Canada has the most users outside of the United States, at more than 10.6 million.

USER PROFILE BY AGE

Canadian users between the ages of 13 and 19 = 2.7 million

19 to 25 = 3.3 million

25 to 35 = 3.2 million

35 to 45 = 1.5 million

45+ = 1 million

USER PROFILE BY GENDER

Male

In total there are 4.3 million male Facebook users in Canada

Age breakdown of Canadian male Facebook users:

1.1 million males between 13 and 19 yrs. old

19 to 25 = 1.4 million btw.

25 to 35 = 1.3 million

35 to 45  = 608,000

45+ = 33,000

Female

In total there are 5.8 million female Facebook users in Canada