Facebook stats shaky?
By Bala Shah

Whichever way you measure it, Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world.  It claims it has more than 400 million members. Techgoss had been advertising on Facebook since February, 2010 and we are quite satisfied with its vast reach in India. But can this reach be accurately quantified?

Every since the early days of the internet, a number of methodologies have been used by websites and monitoring companies to measure membership and traffic. While total membership is easy, breakup by country is harder to work out.  None of the methodologies to work out country wide figures are 100 percent accurate.  For years, hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue changed hands based on Alexa figures.  ComScore and other internet monitoring firms also told clients about visitors from each country to their sites.  By 2009, it became clear that Alexa and ComScore had flaws in the way they measured traffic. Alexa and ComScore have now made changes to their measurement systems.

Till today,  there is no one in India who can tell you the number of internet users in the country and the figure varies from around 50 million to 90 million plus.

Norwegian tech firm Pandia describes itself as a site devoted to effective Internet searching and search engine optimization.  Pandia has published facts that counter claims made by Facebook to its advertisers that it has 1.6 million users in Norway’s capital Oslo

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Norway has a very high Internet presentation, but we have always found the number of 2.6 million registered Facebook users to be too high. That would mean that half of the 5 million inhabitants have Facebook accounts.

Facebook tells advertisers that it has 1.6 million users in the capital Oslo. The problem is that Oslo has no more than 600,000 inhabitants. If you count the greater Oslo metropolitan area, the number increases to 900,000, but even if all of them used Facebook this would not be enough

Espen Grimmert, Market Director of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten says that the Facebook advertiser tool tells him that there are 850,000 Facebook users between the age of 20 and 29 in Norway. Too bad there are only 613,000 people in this age cohort in the country.
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Till Facebook makes its methodology public, one can not be sure of how many members it has in every country.  As compared to countries like India, Pakistan and Russia, Norway is wired well and so theoretically it should be easier to measure its stats. If mistakes have been made in Norway, figures for other countries could be skewed as well. But one thing is clear – Facebook is No. 1 world wide and that it enough for most advertisors.