Last night I went to a Facebook event at the Brandhacker meetup at Zanzibar on W.46th Street and 9th Avenue – this was the 4th Brandhacker event I attended and they’re pretty good.  The other reason I went – Facebook doesn’t give many events – they rarely speak or give parties – and I am using Facebook a lot – so much so that understanding how Facebook works, as a power user, is interesting and useful to me.   I also saw a few good friends at the Brandhacker Meetup, so in true Social Media fashion, a business networking event is also an event to hang out with friends, and I did.

BTW, the question below comes from QWidget – a new tool we’re trying on Blogspeedway.com blogs – in fact, we’re the first bloggers outside of the creators at ChatThePlanet.com, who are using QWidget.

[qwidget question="27"]

Answer the question if you want to, it’ll help with research and hopefully will induce more comments.

Anyway, back to the main point of this post -

An interesting factoid is 10% of Facebook users are influencers.

For one thing, Facebook has 44.2 million monthly active users in the United States (I forgot to ask how an active user is defined, however) and 150 Million Worldwide; Facebook exists in 60 languages and the site content is translated by unpaid users who are enthusiast volunteers (the actual user content is never translated, though).

I found you could do a lot of demographic research with Facebook, more than I realized and for free and we were shown how to do that.

Also, I got to appreciate the difference between the News Feed and the Live Feed – the Life Feed is all the posts your friends are doing while the News Feed is an algorithmic ranking and selective viewing of select messages and actions your friends are doing and is conditioned by your actions an what behaviors you take on your own Facebook account.

There was a lot of additional metrics information the Lexicon program (http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/index.php?q=Barack+Obama) that gives you some basic statistics on popularity – but is still fairly limited.

The New Lexicon is a bit more advanced and to my liking but is not released yet and all you can see is a demo

As you can see from the map below – there’s demographic information that geotargeted and in this case, democrats vs. republicans – the map wasn’t that different than than the results from the Presidential Election last November.

There’s also a more advanced version of metrics reporting for big brand advertisers that we were briefly shown – but it’s not something you or I can get access to easily, or at all.

There was a lot more, not all of it I remember – got the sense we should use Facebook much more as research tool and a communications tool than we do.