Facebook has today shared its financial stats for the fourth quarter of last year, and in doing so, has dropped yet another installment of its ever-impressive user statistics. As has been the case consistently over the past few years, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has exceeded quite a few milestones, and the world’s most popular social network of all time has has now passed the 1.06 billion monthly active user (MAU) mark.
The social company had long been expected to pass the monumental billion mark before eventually doing so in October of last year, but the growth since then – some 60 million active users – is pretty startling in itself. As well as that, the number of daily active users (DAUs) averaged at more than 618 million through December 2012, with the number of monthly active mobile users hitting more than two-thirds of a billion, at 680 million.
Signups on a social network like Facebook are one thing, but keeping a user base interested enough to remain active month-in, month-out is something Zuck and his development team seem to have mastered down to a fine art. The 1.06 billion MAUs as of December 31st, 2012, was an increase of 25% year-on-year, while the number of DAUs equated to a 28% year-on-year surge.
But the real juice arrives in the progress of mobile. It is certainly a field Facebook had initial teething issues with, but since releasing version 5 for both iOS and Android, things have continued to progress. The number of daily active users on mobile devices such as the Nexus 7, iPad, iPhone and Galaxy S III exceeded the number of web daily active users for the first time in Q4 2012, and given the way the market is continuing to lean on mobile devices – particularly with social apps and services – the swing is certain to stay in favor of mobile indefinitely from here on in.
The portion of Facebook users logging in on mobile devices stood at around 40 per cent in 2011, and passed the 50 percent mark in 2012. Some commentators suspect that figure could rise to as much as 70 per cent by the end of this year, as users look to their smartphones and tablets for their fix of the world’s most populous social hunt.
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