Facebook Demographic, Nick Clegg and the Election

With the election coming up tomorrow, there have been many political discussions and debates over the last few weeks. Many websites have polls where the web sites users can enter their voting intention and compare it to others on the site, it is afterall the first truly “Digital Election” One particular poll that interested me was one on facebook, it appears to be exceptionally pro Liberal Democrat and this got me thinking as to why?

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The latest Polls such as YouGov , polls of polls or Com Res all suggest something similar all pointing towards a likely Hung Parliament. For example the YouGov poll conducted on the 5^th of May suggested the following result:

I you compare this to the facebook questionnaire of “Who do you want to be Prime Minister?” It produced the following results:

This is an overwhelming victory for the liberal democrats, and it got me wondering about why? What sort of person uses facebook? Is the demographic still largely the young? Then how can we use this information when we are marketing and choosing our target market.

I did some research using Facebook’s advertising platform and produced this graph:



These results are for Facebook users in the UK, in the US now the distribution of users appears to be fairly even across the age rank but in the UK it is largely used by younger people. Younger people tend to be more idealistic and more liberal in their views and it may well account for why there is such a high percentage of users voting for Nick Clegg on the facebook poll. Maybe over the coming years we will move more towards the US demographic for Facebook as the older generations begin using it.

This is useful information for us from an Online Marketing perspective as we need to be aware of our target market and where that market can be found. The Facebook advertising platform does allow you to customise your target market by interest, age, sex and geography which allows it to be much more precise and effective than Google’s advertising. It looks at the moment though to be a great platform particularly if you are targeting people under the age of 30.

It is expected that Facebook will overtake Google in the advertising market and its clear to see why, the potential is huge. If you are thinking of advertising at the moment make sure you do limit who your advert appears to using Facebooks tools. If you are using it for Viral marketing without paying for advertising our advice would be to be aware of the current UK demographic before investing too much time into it.