Facebook statistics continue to astound

Even before the movie ‘The Social Network’ became a 2011 Oscar contender, Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild Facebook had already gained 248 million users.  And that was in 2010 alone! We all know more people are adopting social media, and apparently at some unbelievable rates.  According to SocialBaker.com, a Web site focused on Facebook statistics, trends and news, a mere 337 million people were registered users of Facebook at the onset of the year 2010. By year’s end, however, that number burgeoned to 585 million, a 74 percent increase. Facebook itself reports that as of March 2011, more than 596 million people worldwide are registered users.  Those figures translate into 7.9 new registrations per second!  

So just who are these users?

Nearly 42 percent, or 248.6 million users are in the Americas alone! Asia boasts the next largest group of Facebook fans, with 161.7 million. In contrast, Oceania is home to 11.3 million Facebook users, a figure so small in the overall scheme of things that it amounts to less than .01 percent of the world’s registered users. According to statistics released by Facebook’s Ad Platform on January 15, 2011, more men than women are signed up to use Facebook worldwide, 298 million versus 288 million, respectively. The gender of an additional 10 million registrants is unknown, at least to Facebook.

Universally, the average age of a Facebook user is 28.2 years old, up considerably given that original Facebook users were all college-aged (roughly 18-22). In the Americas, the median user is 29.8 years old, while in Asia, the average user is 25.1 years old.

(http://www.slideshare.net/amover/facebook-demographics-2011?from=share_e...).