Facebook has officially reached 500 million users. 500 million, that is a huge number, isn’t it? If it was a country, it is already bigger than the United States in terms of population, behind only China and India.
What’s more impressive is that EVERYONE in that country has at least three qualities: 1) basic reading and writing skills, 2) access to a computer and 3) access to the Internet.
Therefore, theoretically speaking, you have the capability to reach ALL of the Facebook population, and try to sell them something.
OK, maybe that’s not realistic.
What is realistic, though, is that when you decide to create and/or share something, you (only) have access to about 150 of your friends. 150 is the average number of friends a person has on Facebook (it’s actually 130, but math is easier at 150). Then if what you have shared is impressive enough, it will make its way to their 150 friends. 150 times 150 gives you 225,000. Not bad. But(!) if you can manage to reach the 3rd level of friends, congratulations, you have just hit the 3 million mark.
And you guessed it, 4 levels is all you needed to reach every single person on Facebook.
So the reality is that the Facebook Nation is broken down into layers.
- 1st layer: 150 reaches
- 2nd layer: 225,000 reaches
- 3rd layer: 3 million reaches
- 4th layer: 450 million reaches
The toughest thing on this list isn’t to go from layer #3 to layer #4, even though that’s where the biggest gap is.
Instead, it is to go from layer #1 to layer #2.
Sadly, for most businesses, they concentrate on building up their audience at layer #1 and forget that the most profitable and cost effective/efficient way to reach Facebook audience is to create content that penetrates the layers.
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