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Couple of days ago, Facebook came out with a rather expected but huge announcement. The announcement with the revelation of these statistics is massive in a way. Facebook has been among the most visited sites in the world in the world for a while now but these huge numbers and its weight as a global platform make it one of the most powerful sites in the world. It has now obliterated all competition on the social network sphere and is head to head with Google for web dominance. It is aggressively marketing itself in emerging markets by tying up with mobile operators and often introducing a zero plan where mobile facebook access isn’t charged. ….Read More

Let us just look at the statistics dealing with people and their activities on facebook and try to understand what it means for users and businesses right now and what it can be in the future.

More than 500 active million users

They have been adding a 100 million every 5 months since late 2008 and this shows no sign of slowing. With the internet growing rate of 400% but having only penetrated <27% of worlds population there is still a lot that can be done. Also 500 million active users is roughly 27% of the 1.8 billion internet users around the world. These numbers are massive and will just keep growing redefining the meaning and usage of facebook.

50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

That is phenomenal! Says a lot about the stickiness of facebook and how important it has become for the user in his or her life. That also means they are keeping tabs on whats happening everyday. It means if you are an active marketer you cant not ignore that you have a chance to grab eyeballs everyday. What would be really interesting to know is how many of these users actually spend more than hour a day!

Average user has 130 friends

That’s quite a lot! Seems like the Facebook fraternity is quite a social lot taking into considerations that it has rigid privacy settings and most people I know and have heard from in real life, online etc claim that they only add people they have (or going to have) a real life connection with.  That means the connections made are strong and tend to have a greater meaning and interaction.

With the presence of photos, videos and most importantly status updates with comments and likes every person is a community by himself. Every post in the broader sense is a thread and creates humongous opportunity for information exchange.

With the last privacy setting change (or debacle as most would like to call it) the default option for status update is global. If only Facebook could now work on properly indexing those updates and creating a usable search engine like that of twitter’s they will be creating the next Gold Rush.

People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Active user is defined here as someone who logs in atleast once a month. 500 million active users totally 700 billion minutes means 1400 minutes per person. That’s 40 minutes shy of a day. A whole day! That is more time we spend more time on Facebook than we spend on eating (considering an average meal lasts for 15 minutes)

So the signing in and presence is not just for trivial pursuits (Hey! Farmville is very important to many), people are quite serious about facebook and spending quality time on it. They are posting and sharing content, interacting with others and entertaining themselves for a considerable time every day. If somebody doesn’t have Facebook has an integral part of their brand promotion, they are forgetting to fill oil in their online marketing car. It will eventually break down.

Here are the statistics about the activity on facebook.

• There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
• More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

With recent incorporation of community pages (a sort of automatically created Wikipedia on Facebook) and their integration with people’s interests and likes, Facebook has opened a treasure trove of information and connections. Groups, Events and Facebook pages have long been quite integral to a user’s Facebook experience. They are now slowly embracing community pages (though I doubt if it will be so immensely popular as the others). These all combined are objects as Facebook puts them and they are 900 million in number. This makes even Wikipedia green with envy. If and when people decide to populate these pages meaningfully it has the power to obliterate a bunch of other sites based on events (meetup, eventful), wikis(squidoo, wikia, wetpaint), groups (google and yahoo groups) and so on. This becomes all the more easy to do because people do not have to go to a new site in order to access, create or sign up for something.

When the average user creates 90 pieces of content (status updates, wall posts, photos, videos, etc) and there are 30 billion pieces of content shared every month Facebook is becoming a complete internet onto itself. If they can create a Google alternative (or integrate Bing as they most probably will) to index and display search results I might never have to leave Facebook for anything.

This is like creating the ultimate living room with the best entertainment and communication systems in it and the most comfortable lazyboys and well provided nourishments. Add some more features and I might not even have to go out of this space for a leak.