Important facts about Facebook
Facebook started in 2004 as a basic social network aimed at connecting college students. Today, it boasts 1.23 billion active users each day and another half a billion who use it at least every month.
Facebook is the most popular social network in the world and has a multitude of uses, ranging from connecting and reconnecting friends and families to acting as a bridge-builder between brands and their clients and customers.
Facebook for Businesses
Business owners now ignore the potential of Facebook at their peril. You could risk falling behind your competitors and missing out on a major opportunity to connect with your customers, whilst building and nurturing brand awareness.
Statistics show that 59 per cent of Facebook uses who express a ‘like’ for a brand’s page do this after they have used a service or bought a product, but there is also the potential to contact potential customers and encourage first-time orders.
Who Uses Facebook?
The gender breakdown of people who use Facebook is quite equal, with around 55 per cent of female users and 45 per cent male. The average user is believed to be 41 years old and 65 per cent of the people who typically use Facebook are above the age of 35. The average user has 229 friends.
According to Facebook’s own statistics, around 1.86 billion people actively use the network on a monthly basis and 1.74 billion people access it using a mobile device each month. Of the network’s daily users, Facebook claims that 85.2 per cent of people are outside Canada and the US.
How is Facebook Used?
Facebook is used in numerous ways by different people, businesses and organisations, but some statistics give a good idea of the most popular ways in which people interact with the network and with their ‘friends’ and contacts.
Each day, more than 300 million photographs are uploaded and pages and posts are liked around 4.5 billion times every day. The average user will spend 20 minutes or more each day on the network.
How has Facebook Developed?
Just as the way in which the general public and businesses use Facebook has changed over the years, so too has Facebook itself. It has transformed into a hugely customisable network, offering a wide range of visibility and privacy settings as well as a plethora of brand pages, groups, events, messenger and marketplace services to compliment personal user pages.
Workplace by Facebook
Workplace by Facebook was launched in 2016 as a means of keeping co-workers connected, and the company claimed during an official introduction to the service last October that over 1,000 organisations were already using what was originally known as Facebook at Work. The top five places using Workplace by Facebook were India, America, Norway, Britain and France, and almost 100,000 groups have already been created.
According to Facebook, companies and organisations who have already embraced Workplace include Booking.com, Oxfam, Starbucks, and Danone. The features on offer include the basic Facebook infrastructure along with features to enable real-time chats with co-workers in different locations, group brainstorming sessions and watching presentations Live.