700 Million Facebook Users

Priit Kallas

414 posts

Filed under: Facebook, Social Media, Trends

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Tags: 700 Million Facebook Users, Australia, Brazil, Canada, checkfacebook.com, Chile, China, Facebook, Facebook domination, orkut, QQ, Russia, Social Media, social network, social networking, UK, V kontakte, Venezuela, Vkontakte

In 2012 expect more than 1 billion people on Facebook. Read the full story.

In our 2010 trend post we predicted that Facebook will have 700 million users. Well, let’s look at some numbers.

According to checkfacebook.com 43.03% of US on-line users are on Facebook. In UK this percentage is 51.5, Canada 47,24%, Australia 42.88% and this data is three months old. Then there are countries like Chile where 66.54% of on-line users are on Facebook and Venezuela with 68.97%. Seems that Facebook penetration, in countries where it is the leading social network, moves towards 50 percent of internet users or even beyond that.

Currently there are about 1.733 billion internet user in the world. When Facebook gets half of that then their user base would balloon to 850 million. Amazingly there are still some countries that have some other social networking site dominating. As we wrote in our post World Map Of Social Networks. The keys to Facebook’s world domination lay in Brazil (Orkut), Russia (V Kontakte) and China (QQ).

I would say that using a single social networking site would be beneficial to all internet users. In smaller countries there is constant pressure from across the borders to leave the local socnet and join the global one? However in large countries you may now feel that the language restricts your social sphere. Still, if you subtract the users of Brazil, Russia and China from 1.7 billion, you are left with about 1.3 billion I internet users.

There are several factors that drive Facebook domination. The network effect will make the value of the environment to go up as more people use it. More people are inviting even more friends, using Facebook will be the norm. Business use will legalize social networking during working hours. Older people join to keep in touch with their young relatives but also form their own sub communities. Businesses promoting their Facebook presence bring in more users. Initial success of the early adopters will move Facebook to marketing mainstream, but at the same time this will decrease the effectiveness of the channel as breaking through the clutter will become harder.

But the basic drive is universal, people want to belong and talk to each other, to connect. Most of the social networks’ content is social chatter, nothing terribly important or of timeless value. But social chatter is what we do and the site that can best mediate it will take everything.

700 million users is 54.6 percent of internet users excluding China, Brazil, and Russia. Maybe note by the end of this year, but it’s entirely possible. Next, 1 Billion. Additional stats about Social Media in Russia.

Posted on: January 26, 2010