27% of Facebook Users Plan to Buy an Apple Product This Year

I have been very interested in the Facebook polling function to get a feel for market dynamics and public (well Facebook-public) opinion. First comment is that it is getting too damn expensive; every time I go back to do a survey it is more expensive! I suspect this means that it is a successful revenue driver for Facebook. Congrats!

As anyone who reads my blog already knows, I dabble in Apple (AAPL) stock trading [and know that I just lied on my previous post about not posting on Apple for a while -ed]. I wanted to get a feel after the Apple new product launches a week ago how interested people were in their products. I hope to do this same survey again in a while, and perhaps use it to gauge when to buy Apple stock.

Quick summary of what I found:

• 27% of respondents intend to buy an Apple product within one calendar year
• 14% plan to buy one by the end of this year
• Guys are more than 4x more likely to have plans to buy Apple products than girls
• Within one year, only 21% of men and 36% of women don’t think they will own an Apple product!

Now we all know that the demographic of Facebook is skewed towards younger demographics, but hey, where else can I get such cheap market intelligence?? Also with over 40 million users, Facebook user alone could (according to extrapolating this survey) account for about 11 million sales for Apple within one year. If the average unit selling price was $200 (low considering laptops go for thousands of $) that is a couple $Billion right there. Keep in mind, last year Apple made about $22B, so we are talking about a lot of planned expenditures on Apple even just from the small % of the population represented by Facebook users.

I have some more statistics which show the demographic breakdown by age of the respondents, but I will save my observations on that for a later post.

In summary, I reiterate my ‘strong buy’ on Apple (I will continue to hold my stake), I think they are going to have a very good year indeed.