What Smartphone Platforms Rule My Social Circle?
Last evening, I thought I’d experiment with the new Facebook Questions feature, and created a poll to see what smartphone platforms my socio-professional circles were using. Thanks to everyone who voted. The response - 384 votes in less than 12 hrs - is overwhelming. I’m taking a snapshot of this data as something representative of my social circle*. Facebook won’t let me close polling, but beyond this point, it’s likely to become a large, more diverse respondent pool.
FB doesn’t provide very in-depth data, so this isn’t a great tool for primary research. But what it lacks in depth, it adequately makes up for in viral distribution. Some observations:
- As the poll spread across Bangalore (mostly Digital Chocolate co-workers), iPhone had a 2:1 lead on Android. This was the first 2 hours, with about 30 respondents.
- As the poll gained traction across India, Android leveled with iPhone, and was even ahead a little. This was with about 100 respondents.
- As the US woke up and came online, the iPhone started to pull ahead, and finished with a healthy lead over Android, even though both grew a lot.
- As the west coast came online, Bay Area corporate types (including my friends at salesforce.com) filled out the BlackBerry column, making it the 3rd most popular platform in my network.
- While I don’t have as many friends in Europe as I do in India and the US, I was surprised by the really poor showing of Nokia smartphones there. It’s also possible that FB Questions doesn’t work in non-English languages (I heard that it doesn’t work in Korean, for example), and that may have impacted the turnout.
- iPhone votes are almost 50% my direct friends, whereas less than 20% of the Android votes are my direct FB friends. So in my inner circle (likely to be full of gizmo lovers, gadget freaks and early adopters), iPhone wins handsomely. But in the immediate next circle, Android is an even contender.
- These polls are extremely viral for the right questions. I framed this one on purpose to sound like a “yes or no” question. If I had framed it as “What smartphone do you have?” it would have sounded a lot more like a painful “survey”, and I doubt that I would have received as many responses. So if I hacked you all a little bit - sorry :). One unfortunate side effect of this was the marginalization of those who don’t own smartphones. I was aware of this when I started, but I was really more interested in smartphone platforms than in what % of my friends owned smartphones (as the question may have led you to believe).
Conclusions: iPhone still rules among early-adopters in my inner circle. Android is an equal competitor just outside of it, and I’m pretty sure that handset price plays a big role in Android’s competitiveness, both in India and the US.
*Demographic note about me: For those of you who don’t know me personally, my online social circles are in the Bay Area, where I lived for 6 years, Bangalore, where I live now, and in other major Indian and US cities. I have just over 1000 friends on Facebook, of whom about 600 could be said to active, and 1300ish followers on twitter, of whom maybe 100 are actual humans who care about things I tweet. 10% of my direct social circle responded, making up 30% of all survey respondents.
