Facebook’s upcoming location-based status update feature will likely be extremely relevant to its users. An increasing percentage of American adults are Facebook users who also access the Internet via their cell phones—a prime target audience for Facebook’s new mobile feature. As of March, 22 2010, 29% of the adult population were facebook.com visitors who also access the Internet via their mobile phone, up from just 12% as of March 24, 2008). However, users are not the only ones to benefit from this new feature.
According to AdAge, McDonald’s will be the first marketer to take advantage of location-based status updates by building an application that will allow users to post featured products from specific restaurants. Experian Simmons DataStream substantiates this marketing decision as McDonald’s customers are increasingly likely to be facebook.com visitors who access the Internet from their cell phones. The same holds true, however, for Starbucks customers. As a matter of fact, Starbucks customers are twice as likely as McDonald’s customers to be facebook.com visitors who access the Internet from their cell phones.
Experian Simmons will continue to monitor this and other important consumer trends and share those findings here. To be the first to know when new insights from Experian Simmons DataStream are available request an alert here.
*Addendum: On May 7, 2010 there were 7,084,599 Facebook users who liked Starbucks and 2,209,919 Facebook users who liked McDonald’s. McDonald’s offers free wi-fi at more than 11,500 participating restaurants and both McDonald’s and Starbucks feature prominent links to Facebook and Twitter on their homepages.