It is a fact of the internet that every click, every view, and every sign-up is recorded somewhere. And theoretically, available forever. Depending on your view, this is either very creepy or fantastically interesting. As I can be a data nerd at times, I fall firmly in the second camp. Pay close attention to these Facebook statistics and stories.
Related post: Facebook Stories … Have You Heard These Remarkable Ones?
With a little effort, you can discover all sorts of interesting stats about most anything. We spend time keeping up with social media sites and users, so we’ve collated the best of them in this list of interesting Facebook statistics and stories.
Social media use isn’t quite universal—but it’s getting close. Seventy percent of the U.S. population now has at least one social networking profile; more than half use two or more social networks.
The number of worldwide social media users is projected to grow from 2.1 billion last year to 2.5 billion by 2018.
For the curious, these represent a series of numbers that boggle the mind, users counted in tens and hundreds of millions, and time in millions and billions of hours.
For marketers, knowing the statistics behind the social networks can help define strategy, allowing focused targeting of users.
Let’s get started with the current review of Facebook statistics and stories.
User statistics
Facebook has more than a billion active users:
The platform has 1.71 billion monthly active users and 1.13 billion daily active users, on average.
Facebook boasts 1.57 billion mobile monthly active users and 1.03 million mobile daily active users, on average.
Facebook Lite, an app designed for the developing world’s slower internet connections, has 100 million monthly active users.
But it’s a small world:
Everyone on Facebook is connected to one another by an average of 3.57 degrees of separation.
Average friends per user:
The average Facebook user has 155 friends (but would only turn to four of them in a crisis).
Women have more Facebook friends on average than men: 166 compared to 145.
Facebook is more than 2x as popular as the next-most-popular social network
79% of U.S. adults are on Facebook, more than twice the percentage of adults on Instagram (32 percent)
Pew, surveying 1,520 U.S. adults above the age of 18, the researchers found that Facebook is still the most popular social media platform — and by a huge margin. The percentage of U.S. adults on Facebook (79 percent) is more than twice the percentage of adults on Instagram (32 percent), Pinterest (31 percent), LinkedIn (29 percent), or Twitter (24 percent).
It’s also interesting to note that percentage of adults on Instagram has risen significantly over the last few years (from 13 percent to 32 percent), Pinterest has also seen a similar curve with 31 percent of U.S. adults now using the platform – that’s just 1% less than Instagram.
The researchers also discovered that Facebook users are much more engaged than other social media platform users. 76 percent of Facebook users use it daily— 55 percent visit several times a day, and 22 percent visit once per day. This is a quite substantial increase from the 70 percent reported in 2015.
Our perspective on user stats
I’m accustomed to only using the word “billion” to convey a type of kidding-not-kidding hyperbole (i.e., “I want to eat a billion pizzas for lunch”), but in Facebook’s case, there is no exaggeration.
They have over a billion daily active users. If Facebook were a country, it would be the most populated country on earth. So even though the way in which businesses (and customers) use Facebook will continue to evolve, it’s safe to say that the platform as a whole isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Investing in building and sustaining a presence on Facebook should still be a top priority for your business.
Facebook Statistics … usage
Facebook is still dominating:
Facebook remains the most-used social media site among all ages, used by 64 percent of Americans 12 and up.
Facebook accounts for one in every six minutes spent online and one in every five minutes spent on mobile.
People spend more than 20 minutes a day on Facebook.
Users generate over 4 million likes per minute.
The video is a big, big deal:
The site tallies 8 billion average daily video views.
Facebook users rack up 100 million hours of daily video watch time.
In September 2015, 1.5 million small and medium businesses shared videos.
Silence is golden: 85 percent of videos on Facebook are watched without sound on.
Facebook is a news source:
66 percent of Facebook users consume news on the platform.
88 percent of millennials get news from Facebook.
Facebook Live is continuing to grow:
By June 2016, businesses were streaming six times the amount of live videos on their Facebook Pages than they were in January.
Only < 30 percent of the Pages that live stream video most frequently are in English.
New parents are power users:
In America, new moms post 2.5 times more status updates, 3.5 times more photos, and 4.2 times more videos than non-parents.
New parents use Facebook mobile 1.3 times more often than users without children.
The lifespan of a Facebook post:
A Facebook post reaches a whopping 75 percent of its potential engagement in the first five hours. However, the peak of the impressions your post receives happens much sooner than the actual engagement.
In fact, your post will have made 75 percent of its lifetime impressions after just two and a half hours.
The best time to post on Facebook:
The best time to post on Facebook will vary from business to business, but many sources cite Thursdays and Fridays from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. as being particularly effective times to gain attention and engagement.
Our perspective on usage stats
While there’s no magic formula for guaranteed success on Facebook, paying attention to the ever-changing trends in how people are using it can ensure your business is taking full advantage of it.
Always stay focused on what your audience uses Facebook for—whether it’s getting news updates or posting photos of their newborn—because it may not align with what you assume it should be used for.
Staying in tune with these behaviors will help you create social marketing campaigns that are more effective and widely embraced by your audience on Facebook.
User demographics
People of every age use Facebook:
82 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds online in the U.S. use Facebook.
79 percent of 30 to 49-year-olds online in the U.S. use Facebook.
56 percent of U.S. online users ages 65 and up use Facebook.
It also spans generations—83 percent of parents with a teen between the ages of 13 and 17 are friends with their child on Facebook.
The gender split is fairly even:
According to self-reported information on Facebook from people aged 18 and older, 44 percent of users identify as women, while 56 percent identify as men.
The split between single and married users is pretty even too:
39 percent of Facebook users have self-reported as being married, while another 39 percent have self-reported as being single.
According to self-reported data, 62 percent of Facebook users have some form of university education, while 30 percent reported high school as being the highest level of education reached.
Facebook is massive outside North America:
Nearly 85 percent of Facebook’s daily active users are outside of the U.S and Canada.
According to self-reported data, India, Brazil, and Indonesia have the largest audiences on Facebook behind the U.S.
Our perspective on demographics stats
The phrase “know your audience” is integral to many things, including successful public speaking, non-catastrophic stand-up comedy, persuasive sales pitches, and effective social media marketing.
It’s important to continually analyze the demographics of Facebook users overall in comparison to your target audience.
If you’ve built a community on the platform already, start digging into your Page Insights on a regular basis to get a better idea of who your Facebook audience is and what motivates them to engage with you.
Facebook statistics and stories … site marketing
There are over 3 million companies that regularly use Facebook to market their business.
70 percent of those companies are outside of the U.S.
Facebook earned 19 percent of the $70 billion spent worldwide on mobile advertising in 2015.
The effectiveness of Facebook Ads
Images are responsible for 75 to 90 percent of an ad’s performance on Facebook.
According to one study, the average click-through rate of a Facebook ad is 0.9 percent, and the average cost-per-click is $0.64. (Note: These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. The performance of your Facebook Ads will depend on a variety of factors including your industry, total budget, type of ad campaign, target audience, and the length of time your ad is active.)
Since so many Facebook users watch the video without the sound on, captioned video ads can increase video view time by an average of 12 percent.
The most effective length for an ad title on Facebook is four words, and 15 words for a link description.
Our perspective on marketing stats
Choose your visuals wisely. They play a huge role in the success of Facebook Ads, so don’t skimp out on your photography or design budget. It’s also important to tailor your ads (and your posts in general) to user behavior on Facebook.
If most users watch content on Facebook without the sound on, don’t use voice-overs to convey the most important messages in your video ads.
Brands and business on Facebook
More than 50 million businesses use Facebook Pages.
Every month, Facebook users leave 2.5 billion comments on Facebook Pages.
Nearly one-third of Facebook users (32 percent) engage with brands regularly.
42 percent of customer service responses from brands on Facebook happen within the first 60 minutes.
Our perspective on brand stats
Facebook presents a huge opportunity to provide fast, direct, and personal customer service.
People will continue to expect faster and faster responses to their comments, which means any unanswered questions or complaints left on your Facebook Page can turn into ticking time bombs for your brand.
More details: 6 Fantastic Facts about the Changing Social Media Landscape
The bottom line
To be effective in this new era, we as marketers need to see our jobs differently. No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares.
We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire brand experiences that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the business.
We can do better. Much better. But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences.
There can never be enough focus on continuous improvement on social media marketing, independent of how well the business is doing. It seems we all are looking to take our success to a new level.
This is an excellent time to make a statement with their marketing. Changing before you have to is always a good idea.