Facebook: Massive Growth

3 million 9 hundred and 55 thousand, 960 Australians on Facebook.

I guess we’ll be exactly at 4 million early in the New Year? No wonder Facebook are opening an office in Australia.

On December 8th last year (2007) I wrote a Happy 2 Million Australians, Facebook post. So they’ve doubled in a year, in Australia. Not bad, when you are signing up a population of 21 million at a rate of 2 million a year. Stories of Facebook’s demise are somewhat exaggerated.

Internationally: It was just at the beginning of December when Facebook crossed the 130 million monthly active user mark. Today, that number is up to 140 million.
From Facebook PR page:

• More than 140 million active users
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
• Average user has 100 friends on the site
• More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

From Inside Facebook:

While Facebook has been growing at around 300,000 to 400,000 active users per day for most of the fourth quarter (based on our estimations), its growth rate seems to have significantly increased in recent weeks to 600,000 or perhaps even 700,000 new users each day.

If Facebook continues at this rate, it could add up to 20 million new users in December and reach 200 million active users by March. Keep in mind however that about 70% of that growth is happening outside the United States.

Facebook also released new engagement stats today about the way users interact with different features on the site. Some highlights:

• 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
• 700 million photos are uploaded to the site each month
• 4 million videos are uploaded each month
• 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each month
• 2 million events created each month
• 19 million active groups exist on the site

In other words, Facebook’s growth is speeding up and engagement is increasing.

We’ll of course continue tracking all the latest Facebook stats for you here on Inside Facebook. To dive deeper on how you can engage Facebook’s 140 million users through guerilla marketing tactics, Facebook advertising solutions, or Facebook Platform applications, check out Inside Facebook’s Facebook Marketing Bible.

When my clients ask me to build a social network “just like Facebook” *groan* I say ‘are you sure‘?