Miniwatts Marketing Group just released some fun new data:

* There are 6,845,609,960 humans
* There are 1,966,514,816 Internet users
* There are 517,760,460 Facebook users

Put another way:

* About 7% of the world’s humans are on Facebook
* About 26% of Internet users are on Facebook

For all the stats check out – Internet World Stats

A new, interesting study by Google (Facebook’s arch enenmy) shows something that most of us suspected, but never had research data to back up. There has always been a lot of discussion around ‘friending’ a brand and what that means in real value to the brand. Well, the results below show us two things:

1. People who do ‘friend’ brands, do so somewhat selectively and….

2. The number one reason for ‘friending’ a brand is to receive discounts and promotional offerings.

So, the moral of this story is that if you are a brand and do not have many ‘friends’, you could offer up special ‘friend’ discounts and promotions in order to drive brand loyalty, but most people are not going to be your ‘friend’ just because they love your brand. Which leads me to believe that Facebook ‘friending’ does not create new opportunities for brands, but could actually cannibalize existing sales by driving demand for discounts where they may not have existed before. I would love for a deeper study on this topic to tell the second part of this story. Does ‘friending’ a brand help (increase sales) or hurt (sames sales, lower profit) a brand.

Learn more that the official Google study page – Why do Customers Friend Brands?

I am not sure I have ever seen a single image that best sums up my feelings about the Google vs. Facebook contest until today when I stumbled on this image that basically says it all without having to say anything at all. Now that Facebook has become the most trafficked site in the US (beating Google) and a recent study showed that the engagement level with Facebook is better than Google, now all Facebook needs is a business model to actually make some money and we may have actually finally found the Google killer (for now)…:-)