Facebook users on Batam Island

I am the midst of collecting data for my Thesis about Facebook. It is about the relation of privacy and productivity towards Facebook. When i look for facebook research online, I saw your website The Facebook Project and look like you're doing Facebook research with your team.

I wonder if you have any suggestion about how can i get the number of Facebook users in Batam islands.

So, yes, as you probably know I did some work on researching Facebook years ago during my time working on my masters in sociology. Back then the answer to your question would have likely been easy, chances are Batam Island would have been categorized as one network (or possibly all of Indonesia). Now that they’ve dissolved the old network sorting system and the associated pages I’m not sure if we can find a very accurate answer. Quickly Googling reveals an O’Reilly presentation that talk about Facebook users by region:

http://www.slideshare.net/oreillymedia/active-facebook-users-by-country-region-june-2007 (slide 13 gets you the counts on Indonesia from 5 months ago, which I know isn’t all that helpful).

Other sources suggest a lot of rapid growth in Indonesia as of late. I suspect that’s maybe what brought your attention to the topic, it seems that many countries go through a period of explosive adoption of Facebook – it’s usually an exciting time when social norms are first being worked out.

It might be possible to contact Facebook on account of a press inquiry and see if they can give you a user estimate, though I doubt they’d be responsive to a researcher. Instead you might be able to construct a reasonable guess based on other measures of connectivity for Batam island. How many people have broadband in that area? Effective Facebook use usually requires a faster connection. Certain portions of the population might be more interested in using it than others. For instance the elderly might be less engaged. By overlaying different population demographics you might be able to narrow it down to a high-range estimate of how many people are Facebook users (or potential ones).

Anyway, suspended from all of this you may also consider how important knowing how many people are active users on Facebook is to your overall study. It might be more important to know what people are doing with it, or what it means to them. This is the sort of information that can be observed or gathered from interviews and might end up being more salient in the long run.