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It may all be publicly available information, but Samer Marzouq, chief blogging officer at Jazarah.net, has taken the time to sift through it professionally. Facebook information, that is.
Though occasionally known for its TMI (Too Much Information) moments, the social networking site is a goldmine for researchers and advertisers (not to mention folk who are just plain curious). While he’s already compiled general information about the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Tunisia and Iraq in one report, Marzouq has focused only on Saudi Arabia for his latest investigation.
“You can define the country to get the number of users in that country, and the more you dive into the world of Facebook and the more metrics you add, you can, for example, figure out how many female users in Saudi Arabia are in their twenties and speak English,” says Marzouq.
According to his numbers, Saudi Arabia counts 2,062,160 Facebook users, with a majority of male users (65.53 percent). While English is the most widely used language (50.13 percent), Arabic follows very closely, with 48.91 percent of users networking in their native language.
More than half of Facebook users in Saudi Arabia are between the ages of 19 and 29, somewhat unsurprisingly, and more than half of those use the social network’s Arabic version. The second largest age group is the 30- to 45-year-olds, who predominantly use Facebook in English, while the third largest age group – 18 years old and under – is dominated by the Arabic version.
The smallest age group, those between 46 and 64 years old, overwhelmingly use Facebook in English. “English seems to have a strong presence in the older age groups, but Internet users in Saudi Arabia are known for being purely Arabic-oriented,” says Marzouq. “But we can notice that younger generations use Arabic more.”

USING USER DATA. But what’s all this information good for? Marzouq says that all of this information is available through Facebook’s advertising system, a platform that enables users to run and manage ads targeting Facebook users and allows them to create and manage “Fan pages” (now “Like”) for their brands and websites. You just need to click the “Advertising” link at the bottom of a Facebook page and you’re in, says Marzouq.
“Users share a lot of personal information, and these details matter to everyone, not to advertisers only,” explains Marzouq. “They matter to anyone wants to study communities and cultures, and at the same time help in understand the size and diversity of the network itself.”
According to www.internetworldstats.com, Saudi Arabia counts 7,761,800 Internet users (as of December 31, 2009), which means that around 25 percent of the kingdom’s population uses Facebook. “Having such information about a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s Internet users through Facebook gives a lot of insights about that audience,” says Marzouq. “Personally, I believe it’s an effective tool to target the right audience, especially through social ads.”
However Marzouq, who is also partnerships manager at Ikoo, the region’s largest ad network and a part of the Jabbar Internet Group, realizes that the information available on Facebook is not entirely accurate.
“The accuracy of the information is affected by the accuracy of users,” he says. “Some users might enter some incorrect information about themselves, but all in all, no research is 100 percent accurate. There is always a margin of error.”
Marzouq’s Facebook numbers can be found at Jazarah.net.

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