Perhaps I didn't explain my point well enough as I was looking at this from a PR perspective of targeting individuals (unique users) rather than people and businesses in a targeted area. As you know, many people have more than one Facebook (work and business / personal.)

Your points are vaild but within the 75,000 people connected to the Bristol networks, but they may not all be from Bristol. i.e. students move back to home towns or London after graduating but still are a part of the Bristol “network”.

I think Facebook, Myspace and BEBO are fascinating and any technical tip bits are welcome. I am still trying to get my head round widgets at the moment and whether they are a good and a bad thing for promoting your blog.

Matt

Which is sad.

23,000 is what you would expect if we were thoroughly average for the UK. And 75,000 would not be unfeasible.

You could (if you had the time) estimate what proportion of the 75,000 are outside of Bristol UK – You can list a random 10 people from the Bristol network through facebook, and then look at their profiles and see if they are actually based in Bristol, England.

I just went through 30 quickly and couldn’t find one that wasn’t.

But say you found that 10% weren’t from Bristol (UK) after looking at a large enough group to be statistically significant, then you could then say fairly confidently that the actual Bristol UK number online was around 67,000.

If your client has a need for Bristol only marketing, and particularly to young people and students, Facebook looks like a very good option. Unlike offline media you can actually track how successful an attempt is so it could be worth just running a cheap tester campaign.

Great point regarding not all Bristolains will join the Bristol network and very usful insight into the number of users too.

The whole debate (as numerous postings prove!) regarding how many people are in each network is some what of a headache to prove for PR’s like me.

The inspiration from this piece is that many of my clients have asked about community networking sites and also want to know demograhics and circualation / readership numbers (as you would with print press). However, blogs and network sites are not formally quantified and verfied like old media.

Also if I have a client (say an accountant based in Bristol) how can you justify that all 75,000 people are registerd on the Bristol network, are acutally based in Bristol and are potential clients? Someone working at BAE may transfer to the North West but want to stay in the Bristol network to keep in touch with friends.

The point being that if say Stu’s figure is the correct one at 23,000 people, the client may decide target the Bristol Evening Post with a circulation of (ABC) 53,826. All clients have limited budgets and this is why this information is important in order to decide on which media is best to target.  

Thanks

Matt

Here is an easy way to estimate facebook use from Bristol if you don’t trust the Bristol Network:

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2086363,00.html
Facebook claims 3.5 million UK users.

UK population 60.8million:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/uk.html

so just under 6% of UK has a facebook account (5.7% if you are worried about rounding up here)

so we could guess at 5.7% of Bristol Population (assuming just under 400,000 people)

this would make 23,000 people a ballpark at the kind of number you would expect – all the figures are rough and other factors apply – but I would expect a correct figure to be of that order of magnitude.

Add in that Bristol is very much a digital city (and only 2nd to london in GDP) it would not be unusual for that figure to be much higher

Hence 550 would be a very odd number.

Fun to do the maths though

-Stu

Perhaps I didn’t explain my point well enough as I was looking at this from a PR perspective of targeting individuals (unique users) rather than people and businesses in a targeted area. As you know, many people have more than one Facebook (work and business / personal.)

Your points are vaild but within the 75,000 people connected to the Bristol networks, but they may not all be from Bristol. i.e. students move back to home towns or London after graduating but still are a part of the Bristol “network”.

I think Facebook, Myspace and BEBO are fascinating and any technical tip bits are welcome. I am still trying to get my head round widgets at the moment and whether they are a good and a bad thing for promoting your blog.

Matt

Which is sad.