Facebook recently hit the milestone of a half billion users worldwide. I work in a world where Social Media is kept at a distance. Access to this half a billion strong audience is blocked. Twitter - no way. YouTube - nada. However, things are changing, albeit slowly. We recently got the go ahead to launch a Facebook page to support one of our health initiatives.
All this got me to thinking about the numbers. There appear to be about 175M Facebook users in North America. It made me wonder how many of those are in Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia. Nick Burcher has compiled some great statistics that give us a breakdown of Facebook users by State.
In Maryland the situation is more realistic - there are 2,083,700 Facebook users or 36.5% of the 5,699,748 people in Maryland (2009 population estimate).
In Virginia the situation is more realistic - there are 3,029,720 Facebook users or 38.4% of the 7,882.590 people in Virginia (2009 population estimate).
It turns out that in the past 12 months The District of Columbia has been the fastest growing area in the USA for Facebook adoption. Check out the stats here. Washington DC has 1,893,840 users as of July 2010. That is, according to Wikipedia's list of US States and territories by Population approximately
315% of the 599,657 estimated population (as of July 2009).
I can only assume that there is a massive population of diplomats and other visitors to the Nation's Capital that aren't counted in the population statistics but have been captured by Facebook. If this is not the case have DC Residents got multiple Facebook personalities?
