Facebook and the Middle East

As TechCrunch recently highlighted, Paul Francis, a blogger, has compiled a dataset of Facebook users through an advertiser tool on Facebook that “facilitates audience targeting.” The entire data set can be viewed here.

The tool shows a total of 42,966,780 members in the top 31 countries. The U.S. leads with just over 18 million users, followed by the UK (6.8m), Canada (6.7m), Australia (1.9m) and Turkey (1.6m).

Forty percent of U.S. users are male, compared to 36% overall. Men looking for love may want to try Ireland or China, where 73% and 72% of users are female, respectively. Other than the U.S., which has the highest percentage of males, the lowest percentage of female users is in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, UAE and Egypt. (Italics are mine.)

Of MENA countries leading the list of Facebook users is Turkey. To some extent that can be explained by the fact that Turkish, like English, is written in the Latin alphabet.  Following behind Turkey, are Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Again, unsurprising given that the aforementioned countries remain the largest markets for technology companies targeting the Middle East.

There are a few take-aways that can be extracted from the data:

1) Facebook has shown tremendous growth in the greater Middle East

2) The largest markets for technology in the Middle East remain Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE

3) As can be observed globally, the ME is no different when it comes to the demographic slant of women on Facebook