What are users actually doing on Facebook?

Joey Mucha — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:19:05 +0000

Facebook recently announced that they’ve surpassed 300 million active users. It is my understanding that “active users” means that they have logged into Facebook within the last month. Another interesting statistic is that half of all users are logging in to the site on any given day. The numbers don’t lie, Facebook is becoming the ubiquitous social network, and much to Mark Zuckerberg’s liking, a platform that is changing the way people communicate.

Sharing and brand affinity is a huge part of what’s changing. Sharing status updates and pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc) is happening 40 million times per day and 2 billion times per week, respectively. That means a tons of content is finding its way to the stream and driving more interest in the stream for users, thus brands are doing their best to get into the conversation. Therefore, Facebook has changed their focus with Fan Pages (with the last pages redesign) to get brands into the stream and create branded experiences.

Some of the other stats that stand out in their latest release, relate to the application and connect platform. Over 70% of users have engaged with a Facebook Platform application in the last month and there are over 350,000 active applications. One number that seems very low is the number of Facebook Connect enabled web sites at 15,000. I definitely see an opportunity for more web sites to enable Facebook Connect functionality. We have done this with some of our latest engagement applications, see our work with MTV.

What is the most interesting statistic that you have seen from Facebook lately?

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What are users actually doing on Facebook?