Facebook recently passed an incredible milestone, 500 million active users. And it keeps growing.
Although Facebook initially focused on the United States, it soon turned its eyes towards the horizon and the rest of the world. And it’s a tactic that’s been working extremely well. Facebook’s current user base is more than 1.6 times the size of the entire US population. If Facebook were a country, it’d be second only to China and India.
And speaking of countries… Now that it’s gone global, which countries have the most users on Facebook?
Top countries on Facebook
Since we don’t have actual user numbers and demographics from Facebook itself (only Facebook has those), we looked at per-country traffic estimates to Facebook.com. The result is quite interesting. (We used data from Google Ad Planner, which provides traffic stats for a large number of sites.)
These were the top 10, but there are of course a lot of countries that have a ton of Facebook users. To continue the list, the countries ranking 11-20 are:
Malaysia (12 million), Spain (12 million), the Philippines (10 million), Australia (9.1 million), Argentina (8.2 million), Taiwan (8.2 million), Colombia (7.5 million), Brazil (6.2 million), Chile (6.2 million), Thailand (6.2 million).
Estimated monthly visitors to Facebook.com shown in parenthesis.
Additional observations
Google Ad Planner estimates worldwide monthly visitors to Facebook.com to 550 million. This is slightly higher than the 500 million active users Facebook says it has, but on the other hand, not all visitors to Facebook.com need to have an account. Still, we’ll use the 550-million number in the calculations here below to be consistent (i.e. to avoid mixing data from different sources, which can give misleading results).
- The United States alone accounts for almost 24% of Facebook’s users.
- The United States has 4.6 times as many Facebook users as the second-largest country on Facebook, the United Kingdom.
- The top 10 countries on Facebook account for almost 58% of its users.
The rest of the countries account for the “long tail” that makes Facebook the colossus it has become.
Final words
Facebook’s international expansion is well under way, and it’s arguably the largest and most wide-spread social network that ever existed. As Facebook grows on a global level, the current US dominance of the social network will gradually diminish and become more similar to the general distribution of Internet users.
Mark Zuckerberg has stated that it’s almost a guarantee that Facebook will one day hit 1 billion users, and at the current rate, it’s certainly looking possible. Considering there are close to 2 billion Internet users in the world, there’s still plenty of room to grow.
